Creative block: You sit down in front of the computer and you’ve decided that you are going to write. Or maybe you need to write. That assignment, that report, that screenplay, that short story needs to get written. It needs to happen  and there is not much time left and you need to do it now. You had an idea, which seemed brilliant this morning when it first graced your grey cells, but now that it has been around for a few hours and you have had a chance to compare it with other ideas, you are no longer sure it is worth pursuing. In fact, you are quite sure that it will be a fruitless waste of time and a mediocre piece of work at best.

And you just sit there, staring at the flashing cursor on the screen.

This will be a situation familiar to virtually everybody who has ever tried to write for long periods: You feel like you just can’t come up with anything to write about. And the harder you try, the worse it gets. And it doesn’t have to be writing. It can happen the same with music or magic or comedy or inventing or anything that involves creativity (even blogging!). You just can’t come up with anything. Sure, you get tired and frustrated thinking about it, but you just cannot seem to conquer the blank page.

Idea evaluation is a technique that I have begun using which has allowed me to produce the content I have been required to produce at the time I have been required to produce it. And in this article, I’m going to share with you how I do it.The paradox of the creative businesses is that they consist of two words that when combined form somewhat of an oxymoron. Creativity is something you do best when your soul is well, when you are most relaxed and quite simply when it comes to you. But business requires regular generation of ideas. And that is not always possible.

But for heavily introspective people like me, that’s not the whole truth. If you think about it, it isn’t that you can’t come up with any ideas. It’s that you can’t come up with any “good” ideas, which means you are judging the ideas and disqualifying them because you don’t think they’re “good” enough. Basically, this boils down not to no ideas, but no confidence in the ideas you have. Which now gives us a specific problem that you can begin to solve.

It’s time to figure out what is causing your lack of confidence and deal with it. And how do we figure that out? We use our old friend, The Wheel of Life. The cause of your lack of confidence is somewhere in the wheel.

Coming Up With Ideas

Nothing will change here. If you are that sort of person, you will still come up with ideas all the time. I have between ten and twenty ideas for things every day,whether it is ideas for blog posts, improvements to my websites, ideas for TV shows or movies and just things I would like to try and do. The important thing is write down ideas when you have them. Always.

Grading The Ideas

The trouble with developing an idea into a blog post or a comedy routine or a song or a TV show is that you need to think that your idea – which we are now going to refer to as “the seed” – is a good one. Nobody has time to invest into a mediocre idea.  With a blog post it won’t matter so much because there is always tomorrow to write another one, but if your aim is, as mine is, to make my blog the best it can be, then I want to write great posts every day, even if that is, in practical terms, an unrealistic goal.

So what I have taken to doing for the past couple of weeks is not only writing down my ideas, but grading them.

So I give them all a mark out of ten with regards to how good an idea I think it is. AND I also record what type of mood I’m in. How happy am I? How content with life am I on a scale of one to ten? Because I know that if I’m in a bit of a crappy mood, I am likely to harshly criticize my own ideas. Whereas if I’m in a good mood, I’m likely to treat my ideas with greater confidence.

What this has allowed me to do, even after only a couple of weeks, is to produce valuable content – or at least content on decent topics – even when I don’t really feel like it. Because what I am doing really, is borrowing my good mood from when I had it to decide whether the idea is worth developing. S0 far, I think it is working.