They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. For a while, that was me. I had a comfortable poetry routine, and for a time it worked. But comfort has a way of dulling the edges. The poems began to sound alike. The spark that once lit up the page was starting to fade.
Routine, Until It Wasn’t
Most mornings I followed the same ritual: breakfast, then retreat to the small bedroom that doubled as my study. I’d put on music, quiet at first (usually Spotify) then louder with blues rock as I settled in, and draft a poem. The ideas came easily enough; poems are always floating past if you’re paying attention. Then I’d spend hours revising until I had something close to finished.
This routine held me for years. It was a cocoon, a safe place where poems steadily arrived. But after a while, I noticed I was recycling the same rhythms, the same gestures. I was producing, yes, but I wasn’t surprising myself anymore.
The Cruise That Shook Things Up
Then came the 100-day cruise. Suddenly my little cocoon was gone. No small bedroom, no desk, no predictable soundtrack. The ship itself became my writing room: a lounge chair by the bar upstairs or on the settee in the cabin writing on the tiny coffee table while the ocean rocked us forward.
Neal Pasricha writes, “Different is better than better.” On the ship I felt that in my bones. The artist Marina Abramović once quoted Krsto Hegedušić: “If you get so good at drawing with your right hand that you can even make a beautiful sketch with your eyes closed, you should immediately change to your left hand to avoid repeating yourself.”
That was exactly my situation. I was writing with the same hand over and over. The cruise forced me to change hands.
An Opposite Approach
Back home, I wanted to keep shaking things up. So I set myself a challenge: instead of labouring over one poem until it was polished, I would do the opposite. I would write 100 drafts, one after another, without pausing to perfect a single one.
At first it felt reckless, like running downhill too fast. I wasn’t allowed to hesitate, to weigh every word, or to polish a line until it gleamed. The rule was forward motion only. Some drafts fizzled slightly, others surprised me with sudden heat. But by the time I reached fifty, then seventy, then one hundred, I was exhilarated. I had built a momentum that my old routine never allowed.
When I finally circled back, I treated the drafts like old acquaintances. A quick hello, a light touch, then I moved on. Each round of revision deepened the work without killing the rawness that first sparked it. By the fifth or sixth pass, patterns began to emerge, echoes, connections, small threads that linked one poem to another. What I found wasn’t a single polished piece but a chorus of voices that gradually blended into something recognisably mine.
Drafting in bulk instead of fussing line by line gave me more than just a stack of poems. It gave me a stronger, more consistent style: a voice that wasn’t imposed, but discovered in the sheer act of repetition and return.
The Lessons of Opposites
I’ve tried this before. I wrote on crowded trains instead of in solitude. I wrote in the voices of objects, or my younger self, or even a plum tree. I started with the last line first. I scribbled in haiku when I was used to free verse. I used to do front of house work at an arts centre and wrote a poem the very next morning. Each experiment shook something loose.
Not every attempt worked. Some were disasters. But even those failures carried me somewhere new.
What I Learned
Doing the opposite wasn’t comfortable. My inner critic protested every step. But discomfort, I realized, was part of the point. It meant I was entering unfamiliar territory, where something unexpected could happen.
On that cruise, and in the months after, I learned this: if you want different results, you have to do something different. The poems I wrote taught me that surprise is the lifeblood of creativity, and routine, useful as it is, must sometimes be broken open.
So if your creativity ever feels stuck, try the opposite. Write in a noisy café instead of your quiet corner. Begin with the ending. Change your posture. Change your tools. Change your hand.
The opposite is waiting, and with it, something new.
Further Reading & Inspiration
If you’d like to follow up on some of the ideas in this post, here are a few books and voices that have shaped how I think about creativity in the past year:
- Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey: short portraits of how different writers and artists structured (and disrupted) their days.
- The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp: a choreographer’s take on how habits can both nurture and limit creative work.
- The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker: exercises for paying attention differently and seeing the world with fresh eyes.
- Neil Pasricha’s The Happiness Equation (and his TED Talks): where the phrase “different is better than better” appears. His blogs are also worth checking out.
- Marina Abramović’s writings and talks (especially Walk Through Walls: A Memoir): on challenging comfort zones as an artistic practice.
- Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott: especially her advice on “shitty first drafts,” which resonates with my 100-draft experiment.
- Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland: a slim classic on the anxieties and breakthroughs of making art.
- Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon: emphasizes iteration, process, and openness.
- Creative Doing: 75 Practical Exercises to Unblock Your Creative Potential in Your Work, Hobby, or Next Caree4 by Herbert Lui: does what it says on the tin really
Each of these, in its own way, reminds me that creativity thrives on surprise and that sometimes the best way forward is to do the opposite of what feels safe.
Rodney Wood 