I have been in a creative funk all summer. Every year as June approaches, I make big plans to sip iced lattes on patios and do my very best work—barefoot and sun-kissed. It never happens.
And this summer was the worst.
I mean, the best in some ways (a wedding, a nearly month-long West Coast adventure, lots of golf, time with my kids…), but I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel creatively. It seems like every time I sit down to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, I’m stuck staring at a blank page/screen. And this from a woman who teaches a workshop titled: No Such Thing as Writer’s Block - Using brain science to get out of your head and onto the page.
The irony is thick.
In early July, my husband and I went to family camp in Western Washington. This was his fourth time as the keynote speaker, and our first time attending without our children. Warm Beach is one of my favorite places in the whole world to be, but it was bittersweet this year without our (no longer) littles. In the lead up to camp, I mourned the fact that we wouldn’t be building rockets, going on nature scavenger hunts, or playing mini golf with our wild brood. And when I had to submit a topic for the two breakout sessions that I was scheduled to teach, I morosely threw out the first idea that came to mind.
“Embodied creativity,” I told Aaron, who was crafting an email to the camp director. “I’ve been stewing on this for a while now, and I’ll talk about how we were created to create and what that means in a world overrun by AI.”
“Sounds interesting,” he said. “Tell me more.”
“There is no more,” I huffed. “I’ll figure it out later.”
For over a year now, I have been a bit obsessed with the concept of creativity. Ever since my encounter with a tech bro in New York City last summer (you can read all about it here), my understanding of what it means to create—to be a creative person, to live an artful life, to engage with others in our quest to innovate and explore and make new things—has been shifting.
I’ve always been a high capacity person, juggling multiple roles and responsibilities in both my public and private life. In fact, I function better (with a more robust creative output) when I am on the verge of calendar collapse. But in the last few months, my life has undergone a pretty radical transformation, and the way I create has changed right along with the rest of me. So, when I started working on my two, one-hour sessions on embodied creativity for camp, I found myself not just uninspired, but downright flummoxed. How on earth could someone who was struggling so much with her own creativity find a way to encourage others to create?
I grounded my session in the basics, things I believe down to my bones and can talk about ad nauseam: what creativity is (rooted in creation, in partnership with God, an intrinsic part of who we are, life-affirming and life-giving) and what creativity is not (only for a select few, something we grow out of, a chore or expectation, confined or defined by societal, cultural, or personal presuppositions, an indulgence, selfish, or frivolous). Then, we talked about how constant connectivity has rewired our nervous systems, making us chronically overstimulated and dysregulated—which often leaves us feeling exhausted and defeated, prone to outsource our creativity in a world where AI is a built-in EASY button or abandon it altogether. And then, with a couple of bedrock ideas undergirding our discussion, we broke off into small groups to consider some questions.
How did I create when I was a kid?
How do I create now?
What inspires me?
What holds me back?
The best thing I ever created was…
I wish I could…
My favorite part of our entire camp experience was walking around that open-air tent as people talked about their creativity. There was laughter and earnestness and animated storytelling. A couple of people even wiped a tear or two. Why? Because:
Creativity matters. We are at our most essential—our most human, connected, playful, and imaginative—when we are creating something.
My dad in his wood shop. My brother adding pineapple and burnt ends to his smoked barbecue beans. My daughter painting a series of tiny canvases for her dorm room. You, whenever you do that thing that is messy and imperfect and sometimes frustrating, but also a vital part of who you are—something that makes you more you.
The stories and ideas flowed in the tent as people reconnected with whimsy. Suddenly we were talking about creativity as a dear, old friend we longed to spend time with, not a project or product with an expected output and a strict deadline. Or, maybe worse, a frivolity that removes us from the “real world” and is somehow meaningless or childish. The energy was electric. Inspiring.
Toward the end of the hour, an older gentleman at the very back raised his hand. He talked about growing up on a farm and how when he was a kid he played—and created—with abandon. I’m paraphrasing, but he said something along the lines of:
“We built forts and lean-tos and created whole worlds. We could make anything out of a stick or a pile of stones, and we didn’t worry about whether it was good or if anyone else would like it or understand it or not. We just… let ‘er rip.”
Dear sir, my embodied creativity class is yours now.
What I struggled to communicate in two hours (with statistics, charts, graphics, and numbered lists), you condensed into three words that I will never forget: LET ‘ER RIP. I want to put them on a t-shirt and tattoo them on my skin. What I have been trying to condense and quantify, pin down like a butterfly on a block of styrofoam, you chucked out into the world like a handful of glittering confetti. We don’t need a different system or a new creativity hack—and we certainly don’t need the “help” of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok.
We need the confidence of a child creating something out of nothing. The joie de vivre of making magic in the form of mud pies and bad poetry, tuneless little ditties that make us smile and fumbling attempts at art. We need to let go of our inhibitions, our snooty inner editors, and all the “shoulds” that weigh us down. We need to simply CREATE. Badly. Passionately. Joyfully.
Humanly.
I think I have been creatively blocked all summer because I know I can’t compete in a world where tech companies are literally gobbling up books and using them to train their AI models, AI books are sneaking their way into stores, and AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos. Where does an old-fashioned, outdated, messily human author fit into this rapidly shifting landscape? I still scribble on notepads and take walks to work out sticky plot points and talk to real, live people instead of typing my queries into a chatbot. What a dinosaur.
But that little kid inside of me still longs to create.
I hope you still long to create, too. And I hope that together we can throw off the inhibitions that tell us our efforts aren’t good enough or polished enough. That we can get our fingers dirty (literally and metaphorically) in a way that no computer ever could. The whole world needs the beautiful, chaotic incarnation of our miraculous imaginations. Because that is exactly what we are: walking, talking, art-making miracles. And we have one very important job:
Let ‘er rip.
Eyes open. Hearts steady. Hands ready.
Thanks for reading. xoxo - Nicole
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