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Every creative person, no matter what his or her medium, knows that he or she better be prepared when their Muse calls. This capricious and unruly creative spirit doesn’t take too kindly to leaving voicemails.

If only it were that easy

Her less-than-gentle whispers demand rather than request. If we don’t drop everything and seize that spark of an idea, we’ll lose it and become impossible to live with. After all, we’d be neglecting the idea that could have made us famous, wealthy, and fulfilled. We’ll cry to our friends over coffee about the brilliant idea that we had and lost. We’ll wander around our house, unshowered and in pajamas all day, bemoaning our missed chance at success. We’ll yell at our roommates, families, dogs, and bamboo plants, decrying the injustice of having a great idea but no time, support, or money to realize it. (Of course, we become impossible to live with if we do answer that call and spend every moment chasing it, but that’s irrelevant.)

But this scenario presents us with another problem: how can we even get the muse to call? She can be one of those women who plays hard-to-get just because she can, with no apparent reason. We’ll try to get a hold of her: we’ll call, e-mail, IM her — hoping and begging for a response. Yet she’s cold as ice, refusing to return our inquiry, no matter how genuinely meant or how passionately requested. Why?

Muses appreciate routines, apparently

Perhaps our muse is offended by our welcome when she does come. Much as I would wish otherwise as an over-committed, frazzled, disorganized musician-writer, inspiration seems to strike those who are organized, in routine, and prepared. Muses favor people who don’t have to dedicate all of their time to taking care of daily tasks. Such people make a certain amount of time to take care of things like laundry or dishes, thereby freeing up their minds when it is time to actively engage in their art. If we can barely keep ourselves fed and our houses livable, how can we hope to have time and energy to spend on more creative things?

But in scheduling time for the mundane, there is room to schedule time for the creative — time to write, to paint, to dance, to play. Knowing that that time is sacred, we can do our “thing” without feeling guilty, giving more brain cells to our art and less to worrying that we’re neglecting something else.

While I was in college, this was never truer than it was for the students in the Music, Art, and Communication building. Music and design students shared the basement of the building. People were always coming and going every which way — but there were some people who could be counted on to head into the practice rooms or design studios like clockwork every day. These people consistently won the leads in opera or collected accolades for their latest design show. I suspect that this had more than a little to do with their organizational method.

Practice makes perfect

Even when we’re not actively engaged in our art, we can still exercise creativity in little things. We can think outside the box in the mundane. When we get dressed, we can choose to wear the red earrings with the pink shirt. We can dare to wear the green eyeliner instead of the plain ol’ brown. Our tie can contrast nicely with our shoes rather than match them exactly. It’s little choices like these, when we can either decide mindlessly or experiment a little, that can lead to bigger things. Like anything else, creativity can become a habit through conscious practice. Choose the thing that is a little less common, a little more radical, and eventually such creativity becomes a habit that carry over into the our work.

Creativity is like a tarantula

We have to feed creativity, like we would feed our cat, dog, or tarantula. At least we don’t have to get bugs for it like we would for a tarantula. For the mind to create things, it needs exposure to ideas. Lifehacker recommends devoting an hour a day to listen, read, or do something different, just to get the brain working in new patterns. In her book Take Joy, author Jane Yolen talks about “gathering days” for writers — days when their sole goal is to go out and experience things that could later turn into material for their work.

Try turning off the instant messaging (or reading some saved ones); turn off the cell phone — or give an old friend a call and see what gears start turning in your head. Take a walk, or a drive, or a run. Absorb without worrying about analyzing; just soak it all in.

Things trickle through our brains slowly. We need to make sure to give ourselves a chance to pull back from everything so that we can begin to process everything — and to allow connections to form. Without that space, physically and mentally, everything we gather just becomes more mental clutter that never gets sorted out, rather than becoming new creative tools.

A writer friend of mine compares this process to facing the cereal aisle at the grocery store. She gathers all of her (sometimes overwhelming) options, then takes a moment to physically step back from the shelf and let the options filter before she makes a choice. (Yes, I know not everyone agonizes over cereal; remember, I said she was a writer!)

Just say “no” to multi-tasking — or at least make it ask more politely

Creating space to digest material may also mean throttling back the multitasking habit. Studies from the American Psychological Association suggest that the human brain doesn’t really “multi-task”; it can’t actually focus on more than one thing at a time. Rather, all it does is switch rapidly between multiple projects — the e-mail, the instant messenger, the cell phone, the Blackberry, that fascinatingly ugly teapot on eBay, the budget proposal. We break concentration every time we switch from one thing to another. This constant mental stop-and-go traffic prevents a continuity of ideas from developing. Creativity is all about connections: if connections can’t form, we can’t be creative.

Granted, the author of this article is listening to German rap, checking her e-mail, talking to three people on IM, and researching other projects while writing this piece. The pace of the world is no longer conducive to doing one thing at a time (and it probably never was), but there’s clearly got to be a limit. Yes, we may need e-mail while we’re working, but can we limit ourselves to just e-mail and not instant messenger? We need cell phones so that we can be reached when that project hits critical error while we’re at the grocery store at 11 p.m., but do we need to text-message our friends about things as trivial as burning our hand on a curling iron or slowly dying of boredom in a meeting? Multi-tasking won’t be going away anytime soon, but moderating it is key to keeping creativity streaming.

It boils down to an issue of balance: having time for the mundane and the creative; gathering ideas and finding quiet time for them to coalesce; knowing when to stay connected and when to turn off the technology. There are no hard and fast rules about “how much is too much”. Everyone’s got a different threshold. But I think we will all find the Muse more eager to gift us with her communication when we start moving towards more mindful and ordered lives.

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Topics

• Pithy Tales
• Accounts & Glimpses
• Verse
• On Writing