Existential Cretivity

What's holding back your creative juices? Here's what might be holding back mine.

I’ve returned from the arctic tundra of north east South Dakota high on the Coteau des Prairies. My last artist residency of the spring went swiftly, like they always do. While on the road, I had several experiences, some of which I shared with top readers and Brimstone Order members last week. One of these experiences was that I finally, for the first time in forever, opened a book and read. I’ve talked about it before, but I have been a miserable reader for the last several years, and it might be killing me.

During residency breaks on a single day, I chewed through half of the Friends of Eddie Coyle. Higgins, the author, has a similar skill to Mark Twain who can tell you everything about a character by crafting their voice and accent with impeccable skill. I’m also shocked how thoroughly each chapter can fill its pages with dialogue. If you pulled all the dialogue from the book, you might be lucky to have ten pages of prose left.

It’s incumbent on me to finish Eddie Coyle. The thing I wrestle with is an ongoing listlessness that tells me I need more literature while being absolutely addicted to my brain oozing out my ears while I scroll through slop on my phone. There’s a lot of discussion in the academic and scientific world about the effects of attention fragmenting, and what it does to our brains. I’m a victim of it all the time. Hell, just trying to find information on attention fragmenting, had me opening extra windows I didn’t need and skimming through off-topic concepts. It’s a damnable mess.

Humans get hooked on rewards easily. It’s something we have to struggle against, but often cave to. Just about every lick of technology we’ve developed in the post-internet landscape has been about immediate gratification. Everything is built on the Pringles mindset: you eat one, and then another one, and just another one. Eventually, after scrolling just another length of social media, or tabbing over to just one more task, or watching just one more reel, we’ve spent a phenomenal amount of our time knowing well that once we popped we wouldn’t stop.

Admittedly, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World had a formative impact on me. I read the book at 20 while working at a swimming pool. I remember thinking that the world Huxley proposed was one we needed to be concerned about, but was ultimately one we’d dodged in the 1940’s. However, now with the doom and dopamine of my phone, I feel like I’ve become one of The Director’s perfectly conditioned children. In Brave New World, children undergo rigorous conditioning to impart both a love for nature, but a resistance toward exploring wilderness. In my world, I feel I’ve become conditioned to long to read, while resisting it at any cost with my phone.

There is developing evidence that reading, especially reading books, can help rewire our brains and fight against fragmented attention. That’s an attractive proposition. However, one of my personal concerns is creativity. I feel there is a correlation between my decline in reading and the amount of available thought and imagination I have to create something new. I have associated this decline in mental creative assets with my shifting from listening to music toward primarily podcasts, and my shift from reading to being a phone junky. I’ve made leaps and bounds in putting music back in my life, even liberating myself from Spotify. But, reading hasn’t been the same journey.

Long ago, when I first set out to create my own stories and develop my own work, I kept a pitch journal. In it, I would jot down ideas, regardless of their value. I’d note what things they might be like and note the general premise of the idea. If it came to me, I’d create a log line, to tie it together neatly. At one point, when I was trying to decide which of my several dozen ideas had legs, I ventured to the mall and talked to strangers. As opposed to accosting random mall-goers like an evangelical, I wandered shops until someone asked if I needed help finding anything. I took that chance and pitched an idea at them. “Hey! Would you read a book that was like Adventure Time meets Horizon Zero Dawn with a little boy and a tiny dinosaur?” I might ask. I’d tally their response, and work on whatever idea got the best response.

DinoBoy & Rex were born through pitches at the mall

Maybe there’s a better approach to getting random sampled feedback, but it lit a fire in me for a lot of my earliest work. I feel like my creative well is dipping dry more frequently than I care to admit. I haven’t scribbled pitches in years. It feels like the relationship between what media I am consuming is a major driving factor behind this drought. It holds me back and makes me hesitate on so many projects that it’s embarrassing.

In 2021, I was on residency in Schuyler, Nebraska. It was a summer camp program in which students and I played a roleplaying game, then created comics and illustrations based on our experiences. During most residencies, I try to relate my storytelling techniques to comics, film, and television. I want to cover most of the media kids I’m working with are likely to experience. I have always run into kids who try to claim they have no taste or interest as a tactic to deflect working. However, this Schuyler residency was the first in which I had a student stop dead in her tracks and have a crisis. She needed help coming up with things to relate storytelling to because she couldn’t remember the last book she’d read, or the last thing she watched that wasn’t a reel. I remember the look on her face as she said, “I don’t think I have a favorite movie.”

This student’s lack of a creative relationship to media was shocking. Now, in 2026, I’m firmly rooted in the fear that she was an oracle for who we all might become as our relationship to storytelling and media changes. I don’t want to be bookless. I don’t want to be pitchless. I want my head full of wonderful nonsense. I’m hoping my entire relationship to media is changing for the better.

---

Today’s Tune