Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide

by John Cleese

Whenever you try to come up with something original, you will find that some days the stuff flows, and some days it doesn’t. When Graham Chapman and I started writing together we would get terribly frustrated and despairing when we hit a fallow period—sometimes a whole morning or even a day when we produced nothing really good. But then we noticed that, despite this, we had a consistent average: every week we wrote about fifteen to eighteen minutes of good stuff. All we had to do was to sit there, whether it flowed or it didn’t, and by Friday evening we would have enough. We came to understand that the blockages weren’t an interruption in the process, they were part of it. For example, when you eat, the bit where the fork returns empty to your plate isn’t a failure. It’s just part of the eating process.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said, “You can’t have a new idea ’til you’ve got rid of an old one.” This insight helped me to view my fallow periods as preparatory to the fertile ones, and therefore as an inseparable part of the whole creative process. When the juices are not flowing, don’t beat yourself up and wonder if you should retrain as a priest. Just sit around and play, until your unconscious is ready to cough up some stuff. Getting discouraged is a total waste of your time.