The Creator created us in His likeness by endowing us with creativity. That divine spark manifests in manifold ways. Artists create works of expression and meaning. Artisans craft objects of use and beauty. Engineers invent devices to aid our endeavors. Scientists and philosophers devise methods of discovering truth. Entrepreneurs launch businesses that create value. And we all come up with creative ways to make things better, whether it’s decorating a room or brainstorming a work project.
My favorite way to partake in creation is writing. I love to write, because it is a powerful way to learn. And learning is an act of self-creation. As I write an essay, I am also writing a better me: etching in my mind a deeper and more indelible understanding of my subject. If I write well, the published product may help readers learn, too.
Writing in a creative flow state—when ideas and words are pouring onto the page—is a splendid mode of being and doing. But getting there can be hard. The creative juices don’t always flow. Sometimes the stream is dammed up altogether by writer’s block, which is one version of a broader problem known as “creative block.”
Thankfully, there are ways to release our pent-up creative potential. For guidance, we can turn to the almighty Creator Himself. God gives us, not only our creative capacity, but a model for how to tap that spring.
The Blank Page: Creation Out of Nothing
That model can be found in the account of the Creation in the Book of Genesis, which begins at the beginning of all beginnings:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The Creation, according to most Christian theologians, was a creatio ex nihilo, which is Latin for “creation out of nothing.”
In a sense, writers must also “create out of nothing.” We begin with a blank page and must fill that void with content conjured up from scratch. That task can be daunting. Face-to-face with empty space, we sometimes freeze up.
Andy Weir characterized writer’s block as “the tyranny of the blank page.” And Neil Gaiman noted that:
Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it's always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.
Why do we draw a blank before the blank page?
For one thing, with nothing written there’s nothing to build on: no expressed thought to prompt the next one. Without such leads, we’re at a loss.
Even if we have ideas, we may still be stymied. Which idea should we start with? There are infinite ways to begin, and we may be overwhelmed and paralyzed by our unbounded options.
Feelings of inadequacy, fear of failure, and perfectionism also come into play. We worry that our notions are half-baked and that we haven’t the words to articulate them. So we balk at beginning. We’re about to type something when a voice in our head whispers, “No, that’s not right. That’s dumb. In fact, you’re dumb.”
The tyranny of the blank page is the tyranny of our inner critic.
But it’s a tyranny that can and should be overthrown. Its power over us lies in the notion that something worth writing must make its first appearance on the page in its final form: structured and mature, polished and pristine. But that is a false assumption.
Brainstorm: Chaos Before Cosmos
After all, even the Author of Creation began with a rough draft.
As the Book of Genesis continues:
The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep...
In other words, Creation was initially an obscure and amorphous mass, devoid of coherent content. The Lord started His masterpiece by first making something messy: raw material He would then gradually sort out and shape into something well-defined, orderly, and beautiful.
The Creator began Creation with chaos, which He then carved into cosmos.
As apprentice creators created in the image of the Creator, writers should follow God’s lead. Just start creating, and don’t be afraid to make a mess. A mess is something, and something is the antidote to nothing, because something is something to work with. The way to overthrow the tyranny of the blank page is by filling it up. So, push past your inner critic and put your ideas on the page, whatever shape they’re in.
This is the early stage of the creative process known as brainstorming. Scan your memory for anything you know or have to say about your subject and externalize it in writing. That can be in the form of rough sentences or just key words. And it can be digital or paper-based. You can dump your ideas into a word processing document, a notes app, sheets of paper, or index cards.
When brainstorming, don’t hold back. Drop your inhibitions. Give your inner critic a break for the time being and go for quantity over quality. As the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling said, “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.”
You may think you don’t have much in your head to pour out onto the page. But once you start pouring, you will find that your inner reservoirs are more abundant than you realized. As David Allen wrote in his book Getting Things Done:
The great thing about external brainstorming is that in addition to capturing your original ideas, it can help generate many new ones that might not have occurred to you if you didn’t have a mechanism to hold your thoughts and continually reflect them back to you. It’s as if your mind were to say, “Look, I’m only going to give you as many ideas as you feel you can effectively use. If you’re not collecting them in some trusted way, I won’t give you that many. But if you’re actually doing something with the ideas—even if it’s just recording them for later evaluation—then here, have a bunch! And, oh wow! That reminds me of another one, and another,” etc.
When you have an idea, write it down and don’t worry if it’s raw or only half-baked. Every baked good, from the humblest loaf of bread to the most delectable piece of pastry, started out as a lump of dough and was half-baked before it was fully baked. The same goes for ideas. And ideas are harder to develop if they’re only in your head. The page is not just a display case, but an oven for ideas.
As you put ideas onto the page, the associative faculty of your mind may automatically remind you of related content you’ve encountered in the past. For example, you might recall a relevant passage from a book you’ve read. Track down that passage and deposit it in your bank of material.
Brainstorming may also stimulate your curiosity and raise specific questions about your subject. Follow those research leads by using a search engine, diving down a rabbit hole of hyperlinks, and/or questioning your favorite AI chatbot. As you undertake this treasure hunt, copy and paste any prize passages you find into your collection.
Condensing your ideas into written words and gathering them into word clouds creates storm conditions for the mind and thus facilitates brainstorming. Writing down your ideas sparks more ideas. Writing those down will spark still more. As you make conceptual connections in your mind, your brain is making neural connections with electrical discharges. Your brain is literally storming. At some point, this chain reaction of creativity may galvanize you into a flow state, even before you write your first paragraph. The sparks of ideation become lightning strikes of inspiration. And the drizzle of ideas becomes a deluge.
Organize: Chaos Into Cosmos
David Allen recalled how his high school English teacher taught him that brainstorming can pave the way for the next stage of the creative process: organizing.
“David,” he said, “you’re going to college, and you’re going to be writing papers. Write all your notes and quotes on separate three-by-five-inch cards. Then, when you get ready to organize your thinking, just spread them all out on the floor, see the natural structure that emerges, and figure out what’s missing.” (…)
If you’ve done a thorough job of emptying your head of all the things that came up in the brainstorming phase, you’ll notice that a natural organization is emerging. As my high school English teacher suggested, once you get all the ideas out of your head and in front of your eyes, you’ll automatically notice natural relationships and structure.
At that point, you can rearrange your notes accordingly, gathering like with like and sorting your amorphous pile of material into separate sub-piles.
That is essentially what God did with Creation; He sorted out the cosmogonic chaos through successive acts of separation. On the first day, “God separated the light from the darkness,” day from night. On the second day, God parted the primordial waters, separating the “waters above” (the clouds) from “the waters below” (the seas) by creating an expanse (the sky) between them. And on the third day, God differentiated land from sea, saying, “Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear…”
As God demonstrated, carving order (or cosmos) out of chaos is a matter of differentiating the undifferentiated: of separating and sorting.
As a writer, you can facilitate the ordering of your thoughts by organizing your notes: by divvying up the elements you’ve amassed into categories. If you brainstormed with index cards, you can sort them into separate stacks. If you’re working in a digital document, you can cut and paste items under separate subheadings. (The free Notion app is great for this, because it makes it easy to drag and drop blocks of text into nested hierarchies and collapsible toggles.)
If you wrangle and corral your notes and thoughts, you will gain a greater command over your subject matter. You will thus be better able to identify the basic message you would like to deliver (your thesis) and how to support it: to come up with a basic plan for your piece, selecting which conceptual assets from your accumulated arsenal to deploy and in what order. This selection process requires discrimination, so this is the point in the creative process when it’s time to call back into play the inner critic you benched in the brainstorming stage.
Again, you can facilitate your inner mental process by externalizing it in writing. Write a thesis statement and draft an outline to plan your piece more coherently and precisely.
Compose: Cosmos Culminated
Your thesis statement and outline will be your blueprint for the ultimate stage in the writing process: composition. Writers in a rush will cut straight from the blank page to the composition stage, bypassing the brainstorming and organizing stages. But since they haven’t yet collected and sorted their thoughts, they often run into writer’s block. Haste makes waste, and a “shortcut” can turn into a long rut.
The composition stage is when you fill in the basic framework of your outline by weaving the strands you’ve gathered into a beautiful tapestry of finished thoughts expressed in complete sentences.
This is akin to how the Creator completed His masterpiece from the third through the sixth day of Creation. After setting the scene, God filled each part of that scene with a self-propagating profusion of life. He caused the earth to “sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit.” He made the seas “teem with swarms of living creatures.” He created birds to “fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens” and “the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind.”
As a final flourish, the Creator authored mankind in His image, according to His likeness, with creative powers of our own: to invent, to design, to craft, to produce, to author. And He instructed humanity to wield our creativity—to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth”—and thus charged us with a sacred earthly mission: to continue Creation as vessels of the Creator.
Rest: Creativity Replenished
Even the Author of Creation began with a blank page and a rough draft. And even God rested when His work was good and done:
God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good (…)
By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.
Similarly, a writer must recognize when his work is well-wrought and ready for release. And he must acknowledge when he needs a respite to replenish his creative springs.
With that in mind, it is time for this writer to wrap up this essay with a parting summation.
Our God-given creativity is both a gift and a responsibility. We can better enjoy that gift and honor that responsibility by learning to create like the Creator. For writers, that means a three-step process for conquering the blank page: make a mess, sort it out, and write it up.