I haven’t written a short story or a personal blog in the longest time. A lot has happened and changed (both in my life and in tech), making it harder for me to find the right headspace to write.

Yet, here I am writing a personal blog post. I felt inspired to write after an author and podcaster invited me to be a guest speaker on her show. I turned down the offer since it was a paid promotion (and it’s been about a decade since The INFP Book was released), but I felt inspired to share my creative process nevertheless.

I received a handful of writing-help books last Christmas and didn’t think I’d have the time or energy to get to them. I managed, somehow, to read a bit. Not to my surprise, many of the common pieces of advice and themes I found focused on mindfulness and paying attention to the moment. One of them even encouraged me to do breathing exercises. So, is writing basically a form of meditation, requiring concentration and few distractions?

That’s funny, because when it comes to my journaling, I write when I’m the most anxious (usually worrying about the bleak future) – not when I’m in a calm and meditative state – to help process my emotions.
It helps when I’m not focusing on what to write next, but just let the words flow as I dump my thoughts on the page. Basically, I’m rambling. My rambling helps fill out the page, and that’s also part of the creative process. I wouldn’t say I’m being very meditative right now (which requires a lot of focus and that’s mostly reserved for when I’m in a Yoga studio).
Another thing I want to add is that I love how easy AI makes my life when it comes to getting things done (and even writing). It has drained my creative incentive to write. AI content is so prevalent and so much of what I consume and even produce is AI that it has made reading and writing unbearable. It has made me numb. That’s also primarily why I took a big writing hiatus.

I found other ways to channel my creativity. My husband and I designed a music-themed escape game, which was a labour of love. We wouldn’t have been able to achieve what we did without the support of AI, which taught us how to code and helped us with brainstorming.
How I ended up creating the game came out of my frustration with the job hunt. I wanted to build things, design, and share my love of music, and I went ahead and built a working prototype over the course of months that I can’t wait to share with the world. It was not a writing project, but it was still a creative project that was deeply fulfilling. It’s so refreshing knowing my creativity manifests in different mediums – it doesn’t have to be words on a page. It could be an interactive experience. (EDIT: re-reading these lines, oh how frustrating seeing now I naturally write with the “It’s X not Y” pattern which signals AI slop. No, that is simply how I write. I wrote this way before AI did. Thank you very much.)

So, a lot of my creative process comes from a place of deep frustration, anxiety, and a need to bring my ideas to life to make that voice heard. It could also come from a calm and relaxed place, as many writing help books suggest, but underneath that calm is a catalyst that triggers me to act and engage with the world.