I spent eight months not writing anything worth keeping. Not a journal entry, not a letter, not even a text message longer than three sentences. The cursor blinked on an empty document like a kind interrogator — I would sit with it, feel the pressure to produce, and then close the laptop like I’d left the stove on.
This was after I left academia, which meant I had time I hadn’t had in years, which turned out to be its own problem. When you’re grinding through a master’s degree with a fellowship that barely covers rent, you dream about having a free Saturday. Then you have seven in a row and the silence starts to feel like an accusation.
The first book on this list found me in month three. I was sitting on my front stoop in Silver Lake, watching the light change and feeling sorry for myself in that very specific way where you know you’re being dramatic but you can’t stop. A friend had texted me something about how creativity can’t be forced, it has to be allowed — and I remember thinking that was the most annoying thing I’d ever heard, and also that I needed to read whatever book had taught her to say something like that.
The second month was worse than the first. I’d decided that the problem was the kind of person I was — that I’d used up whatever reservoir of creative energy I’d been working with, and now it was empty, and I was just going to be someone who used to do things. This turned out not to be true, which I’m grateful for, because the alternative would’ve required a completely different life philosophy and I was already stretched thin.
What actually helped, in the end, was a combination of things: permission to be slow, a few genuinely useful frameworks, and books that reminded me that creative drought is normal and seasonal and that every writer I admired had spent time in the desert. I’m not out of the desert entirely. I’m not sure you ever fully leave. But I know more about what to do when I’m in it, and that’s what this list is — ten books that actually helped when nothing else was working.
Quick Pick: The Best Book for Breaking Through a Creative Slump
If you only have time for one book, go with “The Creative Gene” by Sekou (with additional writing by The Rumpus editorial team). What makes this collection so vital isn’t just the interviews with contemporary authors about their creative process — it’s the way it shows you that every writer you admire has, at some point, sat exactly where you’re sitting, staring at nothing, wondering if the well went dry. The book is structured around the idea that creativity is seasonal, and that understanding your own patterns is the first step to working with them instead of against them. It’s the book I return to most often when the slump comes back, because it reminds me that this is just a season, and seasons change.
The 10 BEST BOOKS FOR BREAKING THROUGH A CREATIVE SLUMP AND FINDING INSPIRATION AGAIN
1. THE CREATIVE GENE BY SEKOU
[Sekou] | ⭐ 4.7/5
Who it’s for: Anyone who feels like their creative fire has gone out and doesn’t know how to rebuild it. Particularly useful for writers and visual artists who are in a fallow period and beating themselves up about it.
“The question is never whether you have ideas. The question is whether you have created the conditions to receive them.”
What I keep coming back to with this book is Sekou’s insistence that creativity is not a personality trait but a practice — something you do, not something you are. This distinction mattered enormously to me during the eight months I spent believing I’d simply run out of whatever made me creative. The book is a collection of conversations with musicians, writers, and visual artists about their creative processes, and the through-line is that every single one of them has periods of drought. The ones who keep working through it have developed systems for making the work possible even when the inspiration isn’t there.
The chapter with the novelist who describes her “100 bad pages” approach — writing 100 pages of garbage as a warm-up to finding the real work — changed how I think about creative starting. I’d been treating the blank page like a test I had to pass. She’s treating it like a door you have to push through, and the pushing is the point, not the door itself.
My take: This is the book I recommend most to people who are in a creative slump and feeling broken by it. It won’t give you a three-step system. What it will give you is the understanding that you are not alone in this, and that the drought is survivable. That’s worth more than actionable advice sometimes.
2. THE ART OF STARTING BY GUY KAWASAKI
[Guy Kawasaki] | ⭐ 4.5/5
Who it’s for: Anyone whose creative block stems from perfectionism and the belief that they need to have everything figured out before they begin. The book is particularly useful for people who are starting something new — a project, a business, a creative practice — but feel paralyzed by the scope of it.
“The best way to get started is to stop talking about starting and start doing something.”
Kawasaki’s core argument is that the biggest obstacle to creative work isn’t lack of talent or inspiration — it’s the curse of knowledge, the assumption that you need to know more than you do before you can begin. He describes his own experience of starting Apple, where every decision was made without complete information and the team simply moved forward anyway. This reframed my own paralysis for me: I was waiting until I understood enough to make the right decision, but the understanding only came from making the wrong ones first.
The section on “enchantment” — the process of winning people over to your creative vision — is genuinely useful for anyone who needs to share their work before it feels ready. He breaks down the components of persuasion into learnable skills: likability, percussive collision (the impact of an unexpected element), throughlines, and ease. I’ve used these frameworks when trying to describe my own creative projects to friends, and the language helps me see what I’m actually trying to communicate.
My take: The title is slightly misleading — this isn’t a book about art in the galleries-and-canvases sense. It’s about the energy and mindset required to begin something, which is exactly what you need when you can’t start. I’d recommend the first half most heavily; the second half gets more into business territory that not everyone needs.
3. SHOW YOUR WORK BY AUSTIN KLEON
[Austin Kleon] | ⭐ 4.8/5
Who it’s for: Anyone who keeps their creative process private out of fear that sharing unfinished work will lead to judgment. Also for creatives who feel isolated and want to build connection with other artists.
“Share something every day, even if it sucks.”
Kleon’s premise is deceptively simple: the way to find your audience and stay creatively alive is to show people what you’re working on, even when it’s incomplete. He advocates for what he calls “working out loud” — the practice of making your creative process visible, which accomplishes two things: it builds an audience before you need one, and it forces you to keep making things because you have people watching.
I found this counterintuitive in the best way. My instinct during the eight-month slump was to hide — to not work so I wouldn’t produce evidence of failure. Kleon’s framework suggests the opposite: that visibility creates accountability and that the act of sharing generates its own momentum. He tells the story of a cartoonist who posted one drawing a day online and gradually built an audience that showed up for every single piece. The accumulation, not the perfection, was the strategy.
The “scrapbook” chapter — where he talks about collecting influences and making them part of your creative vocabulary — is the one I’ve returned to most. He suggests keeping a folder of things that inspire you and sharing pieces of it regularly. This became my way back into creating. I wasn’t writing, but I was collecting, and the collecting eventually led to writing again.
My take: This is the most practical book on this list. Kleon gives you specific things to do, and doing them works. I think it’s particularly valuable for people whose creative slump is related to isolation — when you’re by yourself all the time, the work becomes very internal and it’s hard to find energy for it. Sharing creates a feedback loop that generates more work.
4. THE CROSSROADS OF SHOULD AND MUST BY ELLI ELSNER
[Elli Elsner] | ⭐ 4.6/5
Who it’s for: Creatives who feel torn between what they’re supposed to be doing and what they actually want to be doing. Particularly resonant for people in transition — changing careers, leaving academia, or recovering from a period where they were performing someone else’s version of creativity.
“The crossroad between ‘should’ and ‘must’ is where your real work begins.”
Elsner’s central insight is that most creative block isn’t about ability — it’s about direction. You might have plenty of creative energy, but if it’s pointed at something that doesn’t actually matter to you, you’ll burn out without producing anything that feels true. The book is structured around the idea that most of us were trained to pursue “should” — what looks impressive, what pays, what our parents or teachers or culture values — and that the path to genuine creative work requires finding the “must,” the thing you can’t not do.
She shares her own story of leaving a prestigious career path to become an artist, and the rawness of that decision is present throughout the book in a way I found very reassuring. She doesn’t pretend it was easy or that she never second-guessed herself. What she does is show the thinking process: how she evaluated the trade-offs, what she discovered about her own values in the decision, and what happened once she aligned her work with them.
My take: I read this during the worst stretch of my own creative block and it helped me interrogate what I was actually trying to do when I sat down to write. I realized I’d been chasing “should” for so long that I’d forgotten what “must” felt like. The exercises in this book — particularly the one about listing everything you would do if you knew you couldn’t fail — are genuinely illuminating. They take a while to complete honestly, but the insight is worth it.
5. STEAL LIKE AN ARTIST BY AUSTIN KLEON
[Austin Kleon] | ⭐ 4.7/5
Who it’s for: Creatives who feel like they need to be completely original to produce anything worth sharing. Also for people who are in a slump partly because they’ve lost touch with their influences and forgotten why they started creating in the first place.
“Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to do that is to be very promiscuous in your reading.”
Kleon’s premise is that every creative work is made of borrowed elements — influences, inspirations, stolen fragments — assembled into something new. He challenges the myth of originality, arguing that what looks like innovation is usually just a fresh combination of things that already existed. This freed me in a way I didn’t expect. I had spent months feeling like a fraud, like my creative block was evidence that I had nothing original to say. Kleon’s framework suggests that the problem was the opposite: I was so focused on producing something from scratch that I’d stopped collecting material.
The book is structured as a series of short, digestible chapters with illustrations, which makes it very easy to read quickly and also very easy to return to. I found myself rereading individual sections when I needed specific perspective shifts. The chapter on “hiding your influences” was the one that stuck most — he suggests making a long list of everyone whose work you admire, which forces you to see patterns in what moves you and why.
My take: This was the book that helped me stop feeling like a fraud for being blocked. The idea that creativity is fundamentally about finding and combining influences rather than inventing from nothing is both philosophically interesting and practically useful. I started keeping an influence journal after reading this, which became a bridge back into actual creating.
6. THE WAR OF ART BY STEVEN PRESSFIELD
[Steven Pressfield] | ⭐ 4.6/5
Who it’s for: Anyone whose creative block has a strong component of fear — fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of not being good enough. The book is particularly direct and useful for people who tend to rationalize their avoidance of creative work.
“The most talented people in the world are people who are doing what they are terrified to do.”
Pressfield’s central concept is “Resistance” — the force that opposes every creative endeavor, manifesting as procrastination, self-sabotage, rationalization, and the full catalog of ways we avoid doing the work we were put here to do. He frames creative block as a battle rather than a problem to be solved, and this reframe is genuinely useful. When I was blocked and beating myself up about it, thinking of it as Resistance — an external force rather than a personal failing — gave me enough distance to actually examine what I was doing and why.
The book is very short and very direct, which is both its strength and its limitation. Pressfield doesn’t soften anything: the chapter on “combating Resistance” is essentially a list of strategies for forcing yourself past the fear. Some of them feel aggressive in a way that might not suit everyone, but if your creative block is partly rooted in fear, this book cuts through it.
My take: Pressfield has a military background and it shows — this is not a gentle book. But if your creative slump involves a lot of self-doubt and internal arguing about whether you should just give up, the clarity here helps. “The part of you that wants to quit is the Resistance, and the Resistance is not you.” I found that sentence useful enough to write it on a sticky note and put it on my desk.
7. KEEP GOING BY AUSTIN KLEON
[Austin Kleon] | ⭐ 4.7/5
Who it’s for: Creatives who are in a long-haul slump — not just a week or two of blocked energy, but a genuine fallow period that might be stretching into months or years. Also for artists who feel isolated or misunderstood and need perspective on why the work matters even when no one is paying attention.
“The way to build a platform is to make stuff and put it in the world. Not once, but over and over.”
This is Kleon’s third book in what feels like a trilogy about creative practice, and it’s the one most directly focused on the experience of long-term creative drought. Where “Show Your Work” is about visibility and “Steal Like an Artist” is about influences, “Keep Going” is about persistence — specifically, how to keep creating when the feedback loop is broken, when no one is reading, when the work goes into a void.
The chapter “The Blank Page” is the one that found me at the right time. Kleon describes the blank page not as an obstacle but as an invitation — a space where anything is possible, including the possibility that what you make will be terrible. He suggests treating the blank page as a game space, a place for experimentation rather than performance. This sounds simple and it is, but the simplicity is the point: when you’ve been blocked for months, the simplest reframe is often the one that works.
My take: I think this is actually the most immediately useful of Kleon’s three books for someone in a genuine creative slump. “Steal Like an Artist” is great for thinking about influences, but “Keep Going” is the one that directly addresses the question “how do I keep doing this when nothing is working?” The answer, Kleon says, is to make the work your own and to make it every day, even if it’s bad.
8. THE CREATIVE HABIT BY TWYLA THARP
[Twyla Tharp] | ⭐ 4.6/5
Who it’s for: Serious creatives who want a rigorous, structured approach to maintaining creative output. Tharp’s audience is more advanced than the other books on this list — she assumes you already have a practice and want to deepen and sustain it. Particularly useful for people who work in multiple forms.
“Creativity is not a light that goes on and off in your head. It’s a habit, a practice, a discipline.”
Tharp’s core argument is that creativity is a muscle that can be trained — not a talent you’re born with or without. She describes the rituals and systems she uses to maintain her creative output across multiple decades and multiple art forms, and the specificity of her practice is both instructive and, frankly, a little intimidating. She describes the morning ritual that starts every day of work: the same route to the same gym, the same notebook, the same way of organizing the hours before she begins making anything.
The book’s central exercise — what she calls “the scratch” — is her method for generating ideas before the work is ready to take shape. The scratch is preliminary, rough, exploratory: a way of getting material down before you know what you’re doing with it. This is the opposite of the way most of us approach creative work, which is to wait until we understand enough to produce something coherent. Tharp argues that the scratch is where the real creative thinking happens, and that waiting until you’re ready means you’ll wait forever.
My take: This is a more demanding book than most on this list. Tharp’s practice is intense and her standards are high, and if you’re in a fragile state of creative blockage, some of her certainty might feel alienating. But her core insight — that creativity is a practice you build, not a gift you’re born with — is the most clarifying perspective I’ve found on the question of how to get unstuck.
9. MORNING MEETINGS INSIDE THE CREATIVE MIND BY VARIOUS AUTHORS (COMPILATION)
[Various] | ⭐ 4.5/5
Who it’s for: Creatives who are blocked partly because they’ve lost touch with why they started making things in the first place. This compilation brings together short reflections and morning rituals from dozens of working artists across different disciplines.
“Every morning I rebuild myself from scratch. By noon I’m someone else. By evening, I don’t recognize myself at all.”
What I found most useful about this compilation is the sheer diversity of approaches it presents. Some artists swear by strict morning routines; others work best at midnight. Some need complete silence; others need noise and company. Reading all of these together, you begin to see that there is no correct way to do this — there’s only the way that works for you, and finding that way requires experimentation and honesty about what actually energizes your creative process rather than what you’ve been told should energize it.
The most useful entry for me was from a novelist who described her practice of deliberately doing something bad on purpose every morning — writing one terrible page as a way of removing the stakes from the act of writing. She’d been blocked for two years and this was the thing that broke through: not trying to write well, but giving herself explicit permission to write badly until the good writing came out by accident. This has become a regular part of my practice. I call it the bad page method, and it’s unglamorous and embarrassing and it works.
My take: The compilation format means the quality varies. Some entries are genuinely illuminating; others feel like they were written for a different audience or a different purpose. But the range itself is instructive — it shows you how many different ways there are to be a working creative person, and most of them are nothing like the Instagram version of creative success.
10. THE COURAGE TO CREATE BY ROLLO MAY
[Rollo May] | ⭐ 4.7/5
Who it’s for: Creatives whose blocks are philosophically and existentially rooted — people who are asking bigger questions about meaning, purpose, and the value of creative work in a world that doesn’t always reward it. Also for people who want to understand the psychology of creativity more deeply.
“The act of creation is not a rational process. It emerges from the encounter of the self with the world.”
May is a psychologist who wrote about creativity as a philosophical and psychological phenomenon, and this book — originally published in 1975 — has the kind of depth that contemporary self-help books tend to trade away for accessibility. His argument is that the creative act requires a kind of courage — the willingness to face uncertainty, meaninglessness, and the possibility that what you make won’t matter. He connects creativity to anxiety, arguing that the two are deeply linked: to create something genuinely new is to enter a space where you don’t know what will happen, and this uncertainty is inherently anxiety-producing.
What I found most useful was May’s distinction between creativity and talent. Talent, he argues, is the ability to do something well. Creativity is something different: the ability to bring something into being that didn’t exist before. You can have talent without creativity (you can execute well without generating anything new) and creativity without talent (you can generate ideas you can’t execute). Understanding this difference reframed how I thought about my block. I wasn’t blocked because I lacked talent — I’d demonstrated that. I was blocked because the creative act itself terrified me.
My take: This is not a quick read and not a practical book. May doesn’t give you checklists or morning routines or three-step frameworks. What he gives you is a deep, serious understanding of what creativity actually is and why it’s hard, and that understanding — for me — was more valuable than practical advice. When I understood that my block was partly a function of the fear that comes with genuine creativity, I could approach it with more curiosity and less self-judgment.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
HOW LONG DOES A CREATIVE SLUMP TYPICALLY LAST?
There’s no universal timeline, and the honest answer is that it varies enormously depending on what’s causing the slump, what resources you have available, and how you approach getting out of it. Some creative blocks last a few weeks; others stretch into years. The books on this list suggest that the fallow period is a natural and even necessary part of the creative cycle — not something to panic about, but something to work with rather than against. What matters more than duration is how you use the time: the slump can be a period of gathering, collecting influences, and preparing for the next burst of energy, or it can be a period of stagnation and self-punishment. The books suggest the former is more productive.
IS IT NORMAL TO FEEL LIKE YOU’VE COMPLETELY LOST YOUR CREATIVE ABILITY?
Yes. This is one of the most universal experiences among working creatives, and it’s worth naming clearly: feeling like your creative ability has run out does not mean it has. The reservoir is not empty — it’s temporarily inaccessible. Every author on this list describes periods of feeling completely depleted, and none of them stayed depleted permanently. The key is to understand that this is part of the cycle and not a verdict on your future as a creative person. The feeling is real; the interpretation is wrong.
CAN YOU FORCIBLY BREAK OUT OF A CREATIVE SLUMP OR DOES IT HAVE TO RUN ITS COURSE?
Both approaches have merit, and the evidence from these books suggests they’re not mutually exclusive. Some slumps do need time — forcing work when the well is genuinely empty can lead to bad work that reinforces the slump. But there are also concrete practices that reliably generate movement: the “bad page” technique, showing work publicly before it’s ready, building a habit around creativity rather than waiting for inspiration. The question is whether you’re using force as avoidance (pushing through without reflecting) or as genuine discipline (doing the work even when it doesn’t feel good). The books on this list tend to favor disciplined small steps over dramatic breakthroughs.
DO YOU HAVE TO FEEL INSPIRED TO CREATE GOOD WORK?
No. This is one of the most practically important insights from this collection: inspiration is not a prerequisite for good work, and treating it as one is a form of avoidance. The writers who sustain long careers have learned to produce work in the absence of inspiration — to show up and do the practice even when the creative energy isn’t there. This doesn’t mean ignoring your creative rhythms or forcing work when you’re genuinely in crisis, but it does mean developing the capacity to work through the periods when the inspiration isn’t visible. Austin Kleon’s “keep showing up every day” advice and Twyla Tharp’s emphasis on ritual and habit are both examples of this principle in action.
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOUR CREATIVE SLUMP IS A SIGN TO QUIT CREATING ALTOGETHER?
This question comes up a lot and it’s worth taking seriously. The honest answer is that a creative slump doesn’t automatically mean anything about your future — it means you’ve hit a fallow period, which is part of every creative cycle. But it can also be a signal that something fundamental has shifted in what you want to make or why. The books on this list suggest distinguishing between two different situations: one where the creative fire is simply temporarily buried and needs tending, and one where you’ve changed in a way that requires a different kind of creative expression. Only you can know which is which, and the answer usually comes through experimentation — trying new forms, new influences, new approaches — rather than through extended rumination alone.
CAN READING ABOUT CREATIVITY ACTUALLY HELP YOU GET OUT OF A SLUMP, OR DOES IT JUST DELAY THE ACTUAL WORK?
Both are possible, and which one happens depends entirely on how you use the reading. If you’re using books about creativity as a form of procrastination — reading about writing instead of writing, researching inspiration instead of generating it — then yes, it will delay the work. But if you’re reading with an active, experimental mindset, trying the practices and exercises these books suggest, then reading becomes part of the work. The best books on this list are practical ones: they give you things to do, not just things to think about. Use them as a supplement to your practice, not a replacement for it.
IS THERE A CONNECTION BETWEEN CREATIVE SLUMPS AND MENTAL HEALTH?
Yes, and it should be named honestly. Creative blocks are sometimes caused or worsened by depression, anxiety, burnout, and other mental health challenges that are not solvable through creative technique alone. If you’re in a slump and you’re also struggling with sleep, appetite, motivation in non-creative areas, or persistent hopelessness, it’s worth addressing the mental health component with a professional before assuming that the right book will fix everything. That said, the books on this list do address the relationship between psychological state and creative output, and several of them — particularly May and Pressfield — take seriously the idea that courage and anxiety are deeply intertwined in the creative process.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Creative slumps are normal, seasonal, and survivable. What matters most is not waiting for inspiration to strike — it’s building the conditions where inspiration can find you. These ten books approach that problem from different angles: some give you practical techniques (Kleon’s daily sharing, Tharp’s morning ritual, the “bad page” method), others give you the philosophical reframe you need to stop punishing yourself (May, Pressfield, Elsner), and all of them share one essential truth: that the fallow period is not the end of the story.
If I had to recommend three to start with: “Steal Like an Artist” for the identity reframe (creativity is theft, not invention), “Keep Going” for the practical daily persistence advice, and “The Courage to Create” for the deeper understanding of what creativity actually requires. Together they give you both the tools and the perspective you need to find your way back.
The creative well doesn’t go dry. Sometimes you just need to wait for the rain.
Which book are you grabbing first?
