Creative Block: Joy Harjo’s Tips to Overcoming Creative Block

Joy Harjo is a poet, author, and musician; she became the first Native American Poet Laureate in 2019. Joy was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as a citizen of the Mvskoke Nation, a self-governed Indigenous tribe in the United States. She attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a teenager and graduated from the University of New Mexico. She went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Joy has written several landmark poetry collections, two memoirs, plays and screenplays, musicals, and children’s books.

Joy began writing poetry in the early 1970s, during the US’s civil rights movement and as a renaissance of contemporary Native art was underway. Poetry became a means of exploring her life as a Native person in the US, and the belief that creativity is a human right became the basis of Joy’s poetry, writing, teaching, and, later, her music. Joy also plays the saxophone and flute and has released seven studio albums. She has performed internationally with the Arrow Dynamics Band and Joy Har­jo and Poet­ic Justice and taught creative writing at a handful of top colleges and universities.

A creative block is a phenomenon best described as an overwhelming feeling of being stuck in the creative process without the ability to move forward and make anything new. You may find yourself staring at your computer screen or the blank page, struggling to take the next step. Perfectionism, your inner critic, or self-doubt may be inhibiting your creative thinking. While overcoming a creative rut is usually a different process depending on the individual, there are ample tips to help creative people along the way.

Creative blocks happen across disciplines. Here are some of Joy’s tips for overcoming creative blocks:

• Find a sense of play. A helpful way to unblock your rut is to invite more play into the process. Get your creative juices going by experimenting with new ideas and playing with new mediums. Embrace improvisation and let go of perfectionism. Doodle in a sketchbook, try freewriting, dance to your favorite song, or make collages out of old magazines. Joy says, “Having a sense of play is where I have found the most profound poetry.” She thinks engaging in play is how “the magic happens.”
  
• Immerse yourself in a new environment. Try to get out of your comfort zone. If you usually work in a quiet space, try to spend time in a coffee shop, where you can observe the people, smells, and noises around you. Bring your notebook and transcribe what you hear and see. Give yourself permission to include anything you notice. Joy says you may find new material that inspires you by paying attention to these sensory details. “What people are eating, what they’re wearing, what it looks like. The conversations that are going on, the interactions between people, the announcements that are going on… there is so much to work with,” she says.
• Put the work away temporarily. If you’re feeling a blockage in the creative process, you may find it helpful to put your work to the side for a period of time. If you’re overworking an idea, giving yourself some space from the project can help you get a fresh perspective when you revisit the creative work. “Sometimes we don’t have the right perspective. So how do you get that? You put it away for a few days. Sometimes for a week,” Joy advises. “Sometimes you need to stand back from it and get a perspective.”
• Refresh your spirit with inspiration from other artists. If you’re feeling uninspired, look to other artists’ work for inspiration and rejuvenation. Joy says when she feels a creative block, she finds that “usually that I need to be refreshed in my spirit… I go find a poem by somebody that I love. Or I go read a book by a poet that I haven’t read yet. I put on music. I look at art.”
• Write about what is on your mind. Personal problems are one of the common reasons for a mental block. If you’re feeling a lack of inspiration, try writing about your troubles. It may lead to inspiration and a greater sense of well-being. Writing about concerns, issues with loved ones, or other stressors can be a valuable form of self-care. “I might write about something that’s bothering me,” Joy says. “And just the act of writing and breathing while you’re writing and just being in that space, it will take you to all kinds of knowledge.”

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