If creativity is going to happen on a regular basis, you can do yourself a huge favor and find or pry open a space for it in your personal world.

True, many people write in coffee shops or paint cityscapes in the middle of crowded sidewalks. Faulkner wrote at the power plant, where he worked. (But come on, it was the nightshift, and he had nothing else to do but check gauges and note readings.)

My own experience, and that of others for whom I’ve been a writing coach for over 3 decades, is that there is real benefit in having a definite space apart for your creative work.

One reason is that creativity is work. Interior work, to begin with. And that takes focused concentration. Distractions eclipse creation. The pressure of noise and movement by others takes real mental energy to fend off, stealing it from our work. In space and solitude, unpressured by other presences, the deep mind has a chance to form its dreams and sentences and images without and make them known.

Creativity requires careful execution. Capturing the right phrases. Flinging junk on a page or canvas or musical notation page lacks power and concern for your audience. In our own space we can try… and gauge whether intention and execution have met. And try again if need be.

And creativity does involve making attempts, sometimes not achieving our mark, and trying again. Which often means frustration. Need for room to pace or stare out a window and ponder. Nothing in the way when we make our dash back to the keyboard or easel when the imagination say, “Go back… and try it this way….”

There are pragmatic and more mundane reasons for having your own creative space, of course – a place to keep your notes, equipment, prompts, what have you, (hopefully) undisturbed. But in my coaching and personal experience, perhaps the best reason is this:

The creative urge asks you to allow the fires of imagination and such skills as you possess to come together, and to deliver to the world something with power to shift perspectives, move souls, change minds. In short – to meet us, undistracted, in a new and open space, where something different can be seen.

Inviting our audiences into this space requires us, first, to create from an open, undistracted space in which clear and powerful concepts and executions arise.