Finding Your Creative Frequency

The best creative advice I ever got came from watching Rick Rubin work: most of us are trying too hard. We layer on complexity when what we need is to strip everything back to the thing that made us excited in the first place.

Annie Ernaux does this with words. She writes about buying groceries or remembering her mother's hands, and somehow these tiny moments crack you open. There's no fancy literary gymnastics, just ruthless attention to what actually happened.

This is the creative paradox: the more you chase inspiration, the more it runs away. But pay attention to Tuesday afternoon, the way your coffee tastes when procrastinating, the specific frustration of untangling earphones, and suddenly you have more material than you know what to do with.

Most creative blocks aren't about lacking ideas. They're about having too many and no clear frequency to tune into. Rubin talks about the studio as a place to eliminate rather than accumulate. What if you approached your next project like editing instead of building?

Ernaux's secret weapon isn't her prose style. It's her willingness to be ordinary. The way her teenage daughter slams doors. How it felt to buy her first washing machine. These aren't Instagram moments. They're the uncomfortable, specific details most of us edit out because they don't seem important enough.

But here's what both understand: creativity isn't about being impressive. It's about being accurate. Getting close enough to your actual experience that other people recognize something true in it.

This changes everything. Instead of asking "Is this good enough?" you start asking "Is this honest?" The work becomes less about performance and more about translation.

Maybe creativity isn't about having a vision. Maybe it's about developing the patience to sit with whatever wants to emerge and the courage to let it be smaller or weirder than you initially planned.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is stop trying to make art and start paying attention to what's already here.