Twenty Years In: How to Keep Your Creativity Alive When Nobody's Asking You To

Nobody warns you about this bit. Starting a creative career is hard, but at least it's obvious — you learn the craft, you get the work, you survive. What nobody mentions is the harder problem that turns up years later: staying interested. Keeping the thing alive once it's also your job, your invoice system, and your mortgage.

I've been doing this for twenty years. I've watched talented people fall out of love with their own work — not dramatically, just gradually, until they're technically excellent and completely bored. I've felt it circling me a few times too. So this is what I've learnt about keeping it at bay.

Always have a project nobody asked for. This is the single most important one. Client work pays the bills, but it answers someone else's question. You need at least one thing running that answers yours. For me right now that's 100 Faces — a portrait project I'm making because I can't not make it. No brief, no deadline, no one to please. Projects like that are where your actual voice lives, and they feed the paid work in ways you can't predict. The personal work is where you take the risks you'll later get paid for.

Treat boredom as information. When the work starts feeling automatic, that's not a mood to push through. It's a signal. It means you've stopped learning, and craft without curiosity is just production. Every reinvention in my career started as restlessness I could easily have ignored. I started as a filmmaker. Boredom — and curiosity, they're closely related — is how I ended up in photography, projection mapping, and large-scale digital art. None of that was a career plan. It was following the itch.

Reinvent sideways, not from scratch. When people talk about reinventing themselves they imagine burning it all down. You don't need to. Every discipline I've added sits on the same foundation: telling stories about real people and real places. Projection mapping felt like a leap at the time, but it's the same instincts — light, image, story — pointed at a building instead of a screen. Ask what the unchanging core of your work is, then look for new places to point it. That's reinvention you can afford.

Change the constraint. If you can't change the discipline, change the rules. Shoot on one lens for a month. Make something in a day instead of six months. Work in black and white. Say yes to a subject you know nothing about — some of my best work came from exactly that, standing on the Town Moor filming a sport I couldn't have explained a fortnight earlier. Constraints force new decisions, and new decisions are what creativity actually is.

Look outside your own field. If you only consume the discipline you work in, you'll end up making versions of what already exists. Filmmakers watching films breeds filmmakers making the same films. Go to the theatre. Read fiction. Stand in front of paintings. Listen to how musicians talk about structure. Almost everything genuinely new in my work was smuggled in from somewhere else.

Go for a walk with no purpose. I've written before about location scouting looking suspiciously like wandering about. It works because attention is the raw material of creative work, and walking is how you refill it. Some of my best ideas arrived on foot around Doncaster, doing apparently nothing. Sitting at a desk demanding an idea has never once produced one.

Finish things. Unfinished projects don't feel like potential after a while. They feel like debt, and that debt quietly kills the appetite to start anything new. Finish it, or officially kill it and move on. Both are better than the drawer full of maybes.

The uncomfortable truth is that nobody keeps your creativity alive for you. There's no employer, no industry body, no algorithm with any interest in you staying curious. It's maintenance, like anything else that matters — done in small, regular, mostly unglamorous ways.

Twenty years in, I'm still doing the maintenance. Still following the itch. It's the only method I trust.