How to Trick Your Brain into Creating Again
When inspiration dries up, stop trying to go straight through the problem. Take the scenic route instead.
The Myth of Inspiration
There’s a particular kind of silence that settles when a writer gets stuck; not the contemplative kind, but the heavy one.
I was sitting in that silence recently.
I was working on a piece for Earworms & Emotions about stress, and every version I drafted got stuck. It all felt too familiar. So, as a kind of creative dare, I decided to treat stress as a character in a three-act play.
Then, I reviewed my own piece as a theatre critic might. I described its “performance” style, its recurring motifs, its lack of subtlety. And just like that, I wasn’t writing about my stress anymore, I was analysing its performance. The distance let me see it clearly, and play with it freely.
So maybe the secret to creativity isn’t waiting for inspiration; perhaps it’s about learning how to sneak up on it from the side.
Creative Constraint as Compass
When you narrow the form, you can widen the imagination.
We often treat structure as a cage, but for creativity, it can be a compass.
Give the mind too much freedom, and it panics - too many directions, too many possibilities. But give it a rule, and it begins to conform along the limited paths that remain open.
Psychologists call this cognitive reframing: when we shift how we approach a problem, we rewire the brain’s associative pathways. By limiting our form, we expand our thinking.
Writers have always known this instinctively.
Raymond Queneau once retold the same short story 99 different ways.
Kate Bush built whole worlds from the rhythm of a single phrase.
Haikus compress whole seasons into three lines.
When you narrow the form, you can widen the imagination.
Playful Ways to Unstick Yourself
Below are some creative detours — methods that twist form and expectation just enough to free the mind. They work for poems, essays, journal entries, or even Substack posts.
1. Recast the Subject
Turn the thing you’re writing about into something else entirely.
If your topic were a person, how would they act?
If it were an object, how would it feel to be handled, ignored, or needed?
Write Anxiety as an unreliable narrator.
Write Hope as a houseplant trying to survive winter.
Write Regret as a retired magician who’s forgotten his final trick.
2. Functional Form
A poem can begin anywhere — even in the supermarket aisle.
Use an ordinary format - a shopping list, calendar, recipe, or instruction manual - to explore something abstract.
Shopping List for a Better Day
Recipe for Forgiveness
3. Genre Flip
Borrow the tone or conventions of another genre and make them carry your theme.
Write Grief as a weather forecast.
Write Love as a missing persons report.
Write Self-doubt as a theatre review.
4. Borrowed Voice
Let something else do the talking; they can often say things that we can’t.
The chair in the therapist’s office.
The unread book on the shelf.
The phone that’s heard all your confessions.
5. Journey Frame
Turn your idea into a map, route, or itinerary.
“Directions to where I left my confidence.”
“Route avoiding disappointment - expect delays.”
“Walking tour of the places where I pretended to be fine.”
6. Constraint Games
Set playful, arbitrary limits. It’s amazing how quickly your brain re-engages once you turn writing into a game.
Every line starts with the next letter of the alphabet.
Each stanza ends with a colour.
You can’t use the word you’re actually writing about.
Why These Tricks Work
Sometimes you have to trick creativity into turning up.
All of these approaches do one simple thing: they create distance between you and the subject. That distance gives your creative instincts room to move.
When you’re emotionally or intellectually too close to a topic, your brain runs in loops - repeating the same words, the same associations. By disguising the subject in a new form, you sneak past the part of your mind that’s trying too hard. It’s the same principle therapists use when they say, “Let’s look at this from another angle.”
Poets, of course, have been doing this for centuries. Every metaphor, rhythm, or constraint is a way of reframing something so that it can finally be understood.
The Art of Coming at It Sideways
When you get stuck, stop staring at the problem’ walk around it.
Write a sonnet as a legal contract.
Describe your stress as a diva.
Make a poem out of tomorrow’s shopping list.
When your creativity doesn’t want to play, try tricking it, by doing something else entirely. So next time you’re at an impasse, take the scenic route.
Try This (Reader Exercise)
Pick one emotion, challenge, or half-finished idea sitting in your notebook.
Now choose a new form for it: a list, a forecast, a script, a review.
Write for ten minutes; no editing, no expectations.
Notice what happens when you stop trying to mean something and simply start to make something.
Let me know how you get on in the comments
Closing Reflection
These techniques are back roads and footpaths — the ones you find by accident, the ones that take you somewhere you didn’t expect.
Every poem, story, or piece of art begins the same way: with a small act of misdirection. We pretend to write about something else, and in doing so, we finally find what we were trying to say all along.