When inspiration fails – Where can I pull some ideas from?

My aim has been to post something on my blog each week. Often it has been more than that. But it is now two weeks since I posted.

I have some stuff in the pipeline, 7/8ths ready to go. Nearly all of it, though, is more than a month old. Inspiration for new material to post has been hard to come by recently. I have been pondering why.

There are a couple of possibilities:

• I'm doing too much of the same thing
  

You may know from earlier posts that I have been doing home renovations. In the earlier stages I was quite engaged in the actual activities of the building process. I was learning new skills, and achieving progress which gave a personal sense of satisfaction.

Inspiration for writing never seemed to be a problem.

In the last few weeks, while renovation has still been all-consuming, the process has mostly been marshalling different gangs of tradesmen, and then cleaning up or fixing up after them.

It's all been so much of the same; too much admin and not much hands-on. Inspiration has been a scarce commodity.

In The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron counsels people seeking creative renewal to take a weekly "artist's date" with yourself – go and do something of your own choosing, by yourself, out of your usual rituals.

Those sorts of activities can help top up your creative well, so you can pull inspiration out of it when you need to. Different experiences beyond the quotidian usually help trigger things for me.

Travelling is also, for me, another time when bits of writing seem constantly to beg being put onto the page.

• I'm not doing enough of the same thing
  

The current renovation regimen, with the associated fact of not living in my own house in the process, has drawn me away from my usual practice of daily writing. Or possibly, given me a tangible excuse for not writing daily.

Keeping a journal has so often, for me, brought with it unexpected insights and ideas. It has brought out things which would not have emerged if I hadn't been in front of a page needing to be filled, one way or the other with something, anything, before I could declare the day's journaling complete.

So it may also be that I simply haven't noticed things which might otherwise have brought inspiration, because I have not dedicated time to reflect or allow incubation of ideas.

As Belinda Thomson has noted in her recent blog post on Getting Past PR, there are times when you have to: "Just write". ("The day I lost my voice")

In that vein, I am doing something different – posting 2 articles at once. The second one (The girl in the white Corolla) is one of the few bits of random inspiration that has struck me recently.

In the meantime, I had better take my own advice – do something different, and do something the same.