You Don’t Have Creative Block. You Have Creative Clog.

Everyone talks about creative block.

The blank page. The empty canvas. The dread of sitting down and having nothing to say.

But that’s not what most creative people actually suffer from.

Most of us — and I suspect you’re one of them — don’t have a shortage of ideas. We have a surplus. They’re everywhere, all the time. In the shower. On the drive. At 2am when you really need to sleep. Ideas piling on ideas, half-finished thoughts connecting to other half-finished thoughts, a constant low-level buzz of what if I just— and oh, that reminds me of—

And yet nothing gets made.

That’s not creative block. That’s creative clog.

The Difference Matters

Block is empty. Clog is full.

Block is the silence before the storm. Clog is the storm itself — ideas crashing into each other, jamming the exit, none of them able to get through.

Think about it like eating. You’ve done a big workout, you’re starving, and you eat everything in reach. Two rounds of toast, whatever’s in the fridge, maybe a second bowl of something. And then instead of feeling energised, you feel heavy. Sluggish. A bit disgusted with yourself. The very thing you needed becomes the thing that stops you moving.

That’s creative clog. Your brain is stuffed full of ideas that haven’t been released. And that stuffed, bloated feeling creates inertia. You can’t start anything because everything is already queued up and none of it is moving.

Why This Happens

Here’s the thing about creative people: our brains are constantly making connections.

We read something, hear something, see something — and instantly it links to three other things. We become what I can only describe as creatively fertile — and when you’re in that state, you’re not lacking material. You’re drowning in it.

The trouble is, ideas are perishable. Or at least, our access to them is.

You know that feeling: a thought arrives with such clarity, such vivid detail — and then an hour later, all you have is the shadow of it. The feeling that it was something. The outline of what was there. But the words? The specifics? Gone.

The Release Valve

Julia Cameron called it Morning Pages — the practice of writing three longhand pages first thing, before the thinking mind wakes up fully, just to get the noise out.

I do something similar. I talk to myself on walks.

Most mornings I’m out before 8am, 7km loop, Cornwall being generally grey and beautiful and either very windy or very wet. And I just… speak. Into my phone. Whatever’s in there. Book ideas. Half-formed thoughts. Observations. Frustrations. Things I’ve been reading that connected to things I’ve been thinking.

It’s not polished. It’s not a podcast. It’s a pressure release.

And what I’ve discovered — somewhat accidentally, somewhat after the fact — is that those recordings are full of ideas I’d completely forgotten having. Things I recorded once and never returned to. A whole archive of my own thinking, sitting untouched.

Which is why these posts exist.

What To Do With Your Clog

You don’t need to fix creative block. You need to unblock the drain.

Here’s what actually works:

1. Externalise ruthlessly.
Voice memos, morning pages, a WhatsApp message to yourself, a napkin — it doesn’t matter. Get the idea out of your head and into the world in any form. Done is better than perfect, and recorded is infinitely better than forgotten.

2. Don’t organise while you capture.
This is the mistake. The moment you try to file and tag and sort as you go, you slow down the capture. Let it be messy. A messy archive of ideas is vastly more valuable than a perfectly organised nothing.

3. Return to the archive.
Set aside an hour every few weeks — or, if you’re lucky, have someone help you process it — to go through what you’ve captured. You’ll be surprised by what’s there. Ideas you thought were throwaway. Connections you didn’t see in the moment. The seeds of whole series of work.

4. Accept that some ideas need to be released, not developed.
Not every idea deserves a post. Some of them just needed to leave your head. Recording it, saying it out loud, writing it down — sometimes that’s enough. The pressure valve doesn’t always have to produce something publishable. It just has to release the pressure.

A Note on This Series

Everything I share here started as a voice memo on a morning walk.

I’ve been recording my thinking for years — into my phone, mid-stride, in all weathers — and doing precisely nothing with it. Hundreds of recordings. A Second Brain full of half-processed thoughts.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to be going through them with you. Not as a kind of navel-gazing memoir project, but as a real-time demonstration of what happens when you finally stop hoarding your ideas and start doing something with them.

Consider this the first pass of the colonic irrigation. 🦊

Next: Why your body has to move before your creativity can — and what the mind/body/soul cliché is actually telling you.