Creative Resilience Day 24: Draw your creative cycle
Understanding your rhythms in making art
Today’s post is part of 31 Days of Creative Resilience, a monthlong journey where we’ll gently tend to our creativity ❄️
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After a week of reimagining our creative goals, whether by releasing external metrics like follower counts, setting love-centered goals, and choosing key presence indicators (the new KPI!), we are now ready to enter our last week of finding ways forward.
This last week holds the most important keys to creative resilience. We can coax out nascent parts of ourselves onto the page or canvas, holding our end desires lightly and with love, but if we crash and burn in the process with no pathway to resurrection, then we fail to be resilient. Our creative spirit is dead.
The good news is that one’s creative spirit can be dead for years, even decades, but still be salvaged from specks of ashes. This recovery and eventual rise is part of the creative cycle, following a general pattern of birth, growth, resistance, breakthrough, completion, and rebirth.
Sound like a familiar framework? This pattern is an incredibly common narrative structure, first popularized in mythologist Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey and then adapted for screenwriting through Dan Harmon’s Story Circle.


The details of each step are less important than its framework as a cycle or circle. This is no linear, three act structure that we learned in school.
The cycle mirrors life itself (by which I mean seasons, plants, the moon, sleep, ocean tides, menstruation, I could go on and on…!)
Seeing our creative process through the framework of a cycle allows for life to be a part of our practice. The ups and downs are not something to will away and push aside. It is an integral part of the circle.
Today we’re going to map our own creative cycles so that we can get a better sense of our rhythms. By understanding our creative cycles, we can better prepare for what we need in each phase and recognize them as they happen. Most of all, it’ll help us trust that the hard parts of creative work are not dead ends, but in fact very necessary parts of our evolution.
Today’s prompt:
Draw your own creative cycle on paper. To do so, think about how you move through different phases of creating your work, from the initial spark to the final product and back to an idea again.
Some questions to start you off:
What sparks your desire to make something? When or where do you usually get ideas?
What happens as you start work? How do you proceed with momentum?
Where do you tend to hit resistance? What forms does it take?
What are some of your common breakthroughs? What helps you reach them?
How do you finish a piece of work? What helps you complete and share?
How do you reset after you’re done? What brings you back to your “home”?
You can visualize your cycle in a circle, a spiral, a wave, or whatever shape feels right for you. If you’d like to reference inspiration, Mason Currey shared a similar exercise with lots of examples in his post “Know your creative cycle”.
Remember there’s no right or wrong step to your cycle. If it happens for you, it belongs on there! The most important thing is to observe your own patterns and get a clearer picture so you can work with them instead of fighting back.
My response
The crux of this cycle that took me years to unlock is that I need to make art in order to climb out of the pit of despair and get back to making art. The irony! Of course, this art is very casual and lowkey—usually for my eyes only in my journal or sketchbook.
Another crucial thing to note: my actual “work” periods are less than half of the full cycle. But that’s whats wild—each step is all part of the work!
Optional: Share your response
What’s your creative cycle? Write out a few of the steps in the comments or upload your drawing to Imgur and leave the link. For those also sharing on Instagram, tag me at caromakes!
This is a general comment on all the days, that I felt I should leave as we’re nearing the end. I just wanted to chime in and say that I have very much enjoyed all the prompts/activities. I’ve done most of them, not necessarily on the date assigned or in order, but when I’ve really sat down and actually thought about the prompt— even forcing myself to do the ones I resisted, I found them to be quite useful! So thank you for putting all this together.