How Routines Help Creativity

“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” -Gustave Flaubert

I stumbled on this quote several years ago, and it resonated with me deeply. I immediately wrote it down in a journal where I kept track of things I’d read that I wanted to remember. I filled that book in less than a year, its pages a transcript of my searching and wondering how I live creatively, do the work I’m meant to do, and be a mother.

In my first year of motherhood, I read Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. I watched and re-watched Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED Talk on creativity. I read a lot and tried to write. Mostly, I just fumbled around, taking notes for a later time (I hoped).

But the Flaubert quote hit me hard. “Be regular and orderly in your life.” Create a routine and stick to it. Do the same things every day. Be boring and predictable. Because, if you do, “you may be violent and original in your work.”

Most of the reading I’ve done about creativity — which, let’s be honest, is a lot — talks about showing up every day in the same way to do the work. The idea that the muse only shows up when you’re already at your desk writing or with your camera in hand is a common one. Rarely does inspiration hit if you’re not already exercising your creative muscle. In order to fully exercise the muscle, everything else in life should be predictable.

Makes a lot of sense to me.

And I want to be violent and original in my work. I want to be wildly creative. I want to make room for that in whatever capacity I can (which is vastly different from that first year of motherhood and will, no doubt, be vastly different in a few years when both of my kids are in school). I also want to be regular in when I work and carving out time to work.

Right now, most of my work time comes before 7 a.m. or between 12:30 and 2:30 p.m., that is before my kids get out of bed and during nap time. If I want to get work done, whatever that work might look like, it’s during those times. Occasionally, I end up with a morning to myself or I take my son to the Y and work in the lobby, but my work time is pretty much set.

So are the routines that make up my day. I won’t go into detail about all of them, but it’s pretty much the same thing day in and day out. The more I’ve read about the idea of a morning routine, the more sense this makes to me. Apparently, people have a limited capacity for decision making each day, so having a morning routine (or any routine, for that matter) removes the need to make any decisions in that time of day. You can save your decision-making ability for later in the day — say, when you’re being creative.

Instead of deciding what to do when you get up, you already know: Make coffee, drink a glass of water, go for a run, shower, sit at computer and work on project X. It doesn’t matter what it is, but having a routine takes out all the guesswork. And, according to Gustave Flaubert, it ramps up your creativity to violent proportions, which sounds pretty awesome to me.

What about you? Do you find that having a routine gives you more space to be creative? Or is your creativity violent and original in its own way? I’d love to hear!