Every artist knows the feeling: you sit down with your materials, a blank page or a half-finished canvas, and nothing comes. Or worse, everything comes, but it’s the same as last time. The same palette, the same marks, the same safe choices. You’re not blocked exactly, you’re grooved.
I recently watched Tim Harford’s TED talk on how frustration can make us more creative, and it has changed how I think about being stuck.
The broken piano
Harford tells the story of Keith Jarrett’s famous 1975 concert in Cologne. Through a mix-up, Jarrett arrived to find the wrong piano on stage: a small, tinny instrument with a weak bass and an unreliable upper register. He was exhausted, in pain, and by most accounts close to walking out.
He played anyway. Because he couldn’t rely on his usual approach, he stayed in the middle of the keyboard, played with a rolling, rhythmic intensity, and found a style he might never have reached on a perfect instrument. The Köln Concert became one of the best-selling solo piano albums of all time.
The lesson isn’t that we should seek out misery. It’s that constraint and frustration push us out of our habits. When the easy route is closed, we’re forced to look for a different one.
In a similar way The 100 Day Project did the same for me. Choosing to work on the same topic for 100 consecutive days means that soon you run out of safe options to try and then you start trying more unusual or slightly whacky ideas. It creates frustration and you start moving out of your safe zone into trying something you'd never normally try and often with favourable results.
Using paper I don't usually use, techniques I haven't tried.
Eno’s cards
Harford also talks about Brian Eno, who has made something of a career out of engineering this kind of disruption on purpose. With the artist Peter Schmidt, Eno created Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards, each carrying a short prompt to be drawn at random when a project stalls. Some are practical, some cryptic, some almost comic. One of the best known is “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.”
What I love about the cards is that they don’t solve your problem. They interrupt it. Part of the trouble when we’re stuck is that we keep pushing harder in the same direction. A card says: stop, turn ninety degrees, and see what happens.
It’s a bit like the broken piano, except you get to choose when to break it.
Making your own prompts
I’ve been collecting my own prompts, aimed at the particular rhythms I fall into when I work. Most of us have a default sequence: start in the same place, use the same tools, work at the same pace, and stop at the same point. Each prompt below targets one of those habits. Steal them, change them, or better yet, write your own.
How to use them
You can pull a prompt out of a hat, number them and roll a die, or write them on cards and shuffle, just as Eno does. The randomness matters, because it takes the decision out of your hands. The part of you that’s stuck doesn’t get a vote.
A few ground rules I’ve found helpful:
- Commit for a set time. Give a prompt at least ten or fifteen minutes before deciding it’s not working.
- Expect discomfort. Frustration is the point. If it feels awkward, you’re probably doing it right.
- Keep the failures. Some of my best ideas have come from pieces I thought were ruined. Eno’s “honour thy error” really does work.
- Don’t treat it as a one-off. The grooves come back, so keep the cards somewhere you’ll see them.
Embracing the wrong piano
Creative blocks feel like a problem to be solved, but they can also be a signal that your current way of working has run its course. Harford’s talk reminded me that the most interesting work often happens when something goes wrong, when the tools are inadequate, the plan collapses, or the easy answer isn’t available.
So next time you’re stuck, don’t wait for inspiration to arrive. Break your own piano, or draw a card and let someone else do it for you.
What prompts would you add to the list? I’d love to hear the strange rules and small disruptions that have worked for you.