Nothing comes from nothing. If you’re having trouble with creative OUTput, it could well be because you have little creative INput.

I know–because that’s been my problem the past few months. I’ve been trying to fish from an empty pond. I’ve been trying to draw a drink of cool water from an empty well. The creative juices just aren’t flowing. (Why are all the metaphors for creativity liquid?)

Refresh Your Soul

“How do you enhance the creative power in your life?” asks Thomas KinKade in Lightposts for Living. “The starting point for all creative acts…is to live life and pay attention!” Get outdoors, study the birds and flowers and insects and rain up close. Go to museums and art galleries. Thumb through photos.

Katherine Paterson, award-winning children’s author, went so far as to say she didn’t even believe in writer’s block. She said that the thing that freezes a writer’s soul and leaves her staring in panic at a blank computer screen is writer’s starvation. If you need more creative “juice,” fill your mind and heart with sights, sounds, ideas, images, and experiences.

With the holidays ahead of us, you might be thinking, “Yeah, right, like I’m going to have time to go fill my creative well with images!” Don’t think of it as an added “thing to do,” but as a mind-set.

Be Mindful

When you’re out shopping or going to school programs, take time to really look at the people…the decorations. When carols play over the WalMart loudspeakers, stop briefly and listen (or sing along). Make time to go to a Christmas concert. (My favorite one during the holidays is when my son-in-law plays in the Tubameisters’s concert on the Riverwalk.)

Take time to fill your mind and heart with sights, sounds, ideas, images, and experiences. And when 2012 rolls around, you’ll be ready to write–and you’ll have something to write about.