Artist’s mental health - procrastination

creative block

One of the most painful things about being an artist is not making art. We might call it “creative block,” but most of the time it’s procrastination wearing a fancy disguise. The writers, artists, and musicians I work with invent the most creative excuses for not being creative. There are the reasons you might expect, like fear of failing or fear of being rejected.

Sometimes the artist procrastinates because the art has become a chore, like a musician who doesn’t want to practice her instrument. Or a writer who dreads his laptop because he’s in the least enjoyable phase of the process.

frozen with fear

Some creative people get frozen because they’re gifted in multiple arenas and don’t know which medium to pursue. They can write and direct. They can draw and sculpt. These hyphenates stand at a fork in the road and don’t know how to spend their time and energy. So they do nothing.

Other artists won’t work because they worry what family and friends might think if they recognized themselves in a TV character, or heard edgy lyrics pulled from the artist’s personal experience.

But the most impressive mental trick artists perform is to stall on the start of a new project because they’re certain they’ll never top their last work, which is criticizing work that doesn’t exist yet, while ensuring that it never will.