You have to Think Outside of the Box to Solve Some Creativity Problems

How I overcame a block with a unique strategy

My son who is an outside-the-box thinker (author photo)

Creativity isn’t usually a straight path from the starting to the finishing line.

We all hit roadblocks of one kind or another in our creativity. Whether you’re a writer, painter, or video-maker, there will be times you’ll run into some kind of difficulty in creating art, and it’s important to learn how to make it through these mental struggles or our creative endeavors can end up in the graveyard.

Or we may get stuck, drive ourselves crazy or completely avoid the difficulty.

Gestating or Rationalizing?

I fell into the latter trap with my latest creative hurdle — although I told myself I was just waiting until it was the right time to tackle the problem. Part of that was mostly true. There are times we need to allow a gestation period before we’re ready to write about a subject. However, I waited for almost a year, and I was rationalizing why I wasn’t writing more than gestating to become ready.

I read a Los Angeles Times book review of Atticus Lish’s novel “War for Gloria” about his semi-autobiographic novel on his mom’s gradual decline to ALS. One thing that stood out to me in the article was Lish saying that he went through a mental breakdown because the subject was so hard for him to write about.

Actually, he said he had two or three break downs and something spoke to me inside my head that this is the kind of attitude I needed to overcome my creative block. It was fight-or-flight time. I needed a take-no-prisoners mindset where I would find a way to make it through my creativity difficulty, no matter what.

Overcoming my avoidance

I still didn’t know how I was going overcome the problem I’d avoided. Which was the next chapter in my one-third completed memoir that focused on my son possibly having a thing called Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), a little-known part of the autism spectrum that is diagnosed only in the UK.

“Your memoir won’t be any good if you don’t write about PDA,” my wife said.

When my wife and I have different viewpoints, I don’t always agree with her. In this case, I knew she was right because PDA seems like an integral part of my son’s life. and I just couldn’t leave it out because it was difficult for me to write about.

Our son has been unschooled for the past two years, and one reason PDA is difficult for me to write about is don’t get to see his avoidance-and-resistance to demands while I’m at work like my wife does being home with him all day.

My creative solution

Finally, not long after reading the review of Lish’s book, I thought of an idea that might solve the problem. This is why it’s important to have a regular writing routine. It forced me to see I was treading water in my writing by compulsively revising my past chapters instead of making forward progress.

I started to feel like a book I was reading at the time (Adrift: Seventy-six Days at Sea) about a guy who was adrift in the Atlantic Ocean on a sloop that he had designed and built until he was down to his final three cans of water.

Fortunately, he tossed some fish guts in the water that attracted a flock of birds and caught the attention of some fishermen, and I needed some kind of divine luck involving fish guts and birds to keep my memoir moving forward.

I’d learned about PDA from watching a video by Harry Thompson, a YouTuber in the UK, with my wife. Why not recreate the scene of my wife and I watching the video by quoting dialogue and paraphrasing information from Thompson?

That was my outside-the-box solution to my challenge of writing about PDA.

The perfect solution

It seemed like the perfect solution because it would allow my reader to go through the same experience I went through to learn about PDA with some descriptive details added into the scene to create some ambiance. I liked the idea because my main weakness as a memoirist is writing about my feelings.

Writing scenes with narrative elements and story structure (inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution) is my strength as a writer, and I thought turning a YouTuber into the main character was a novel solution.

I have a journalism background so it was easy to hit pause on the video and type quotes from the video. Then my wife gave me an assist by showing me how I could click the three little dots after the title, click open transcript and then click toggle timestamps to get rid of timestamps on the video transcript.

This made it simple to copy and paste quotes or paraphrase what Harry said, and I’ve used this strategy often to quote or paraphrase information from articles.

Setting up the scene

I set up the scene by describing how my wife first learned about PDA from watching a mom YouTuber in the UK with a PDA son. I also included a few key details like my wife and I sitting on a black leather sofa in our living room and plugging our ear pods into a splitter cable to let us to listen at the same time.

Then after my first two paragraphs to establish the scene (I will drop a link at the end of the story, so you can see the entire story) I just kinda let Harry take over the scene by quoting and paraphrasing what he was saying about PDA to allow my readers to experience learning about PDA the same exact way I did.

It felt crazy to let a YouTuber be in the driver’s seat, but I felt it was working.

Of course, I broke up the quotes and paraphrases from Harry with a moment when my wife hit pause on the video to react to something Harry said, and I ended the scene by having my wife ask me if I thought our son had PDA and followed this with dialogue from our first parenting talk with PDA in mind.

The Final Result

And of course, I posted my scene on Medium and it’s my most-read article, “How I learned About PDA,” and I’ll let you decide if my solution worked.

I was satisfied with the final result because it accurately showed in narrative style how I came to learn about PDA — which was the focus on the next part of my memoir when my son reached the age of twelve — and I liked how I used a creative outside-the-box solution to a “block” I was experiencing at the time.

I also like how I mentally resolved to “write through the problem” with a no-matter-what mindset to overcome my belief that I couldn’t write about PDA.

I also learned from the experience the danger of telling myself I couldn’t do something just because it’s too difficult. This only becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where I become prone to more likely believe I can’t do something.

Rather than have a “fixed” attitude and saying I can’t do something, I am learning to be more honest with myself and say things like, “I might not be very good at X or how to deal with Y, but I can learn how to do X and Y.”

Hi I’m Scot and thank you for making it to the end of my article : )

You might also like a YouTube video on my journey as a writer.

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