Creativity is often thought of as a cerebral business. The artist seeks inspiration in solitude, and having pored over details of their life and connected them to the Great Themes of Art pours heart and soul into whatever their particular Thing is.

That model is fine as far as it goes, but overlooks a whole bunch of stuff. Like, creativity is a full-body sport. Don’t believe me? Try this, an experiment conducted on me by NLP trainer Dr Ron Perry a few months ago, whose expertise is in understanding how mind and body connect:

Ask yourself how inspired you feel, on a scale of 1-10.

Again, note how you represent your neck to yourself.

Whatever happened when you went through this process, something happened, right? And I’m willing to bet on the basis of my experience and seeing other people do this that you’ll feel a lot more inspired the other end of this process than you did at the start.

Hmm. Think about the word ‘inspiration’. The core of it has to do with breathing: respiration/inspiration, right? And the process you’ll have just gone through will have changed the way that you breathe. This is something I’ve noticed before now, too, either when I’m writing or about to write. And that’s the way it should be: the feeling of waiting in a queue and the feeling of being fired up to write a scene should not be the same. If the feeling was the same, how would you know which one to do?

So, there’s a whole set of physiological aspects to your state of creativity. And learning to recognise them, and nurture them, is one way to cultivate your creativity so that it happens when you want it to, and not out of the blue as if it’s something that just happens at random. It doesn’t, any more than you get sexually excited while you’re filling in a tax return. Certain patterns of breathing, of posture, of pace, go together better than others to help you accomplish particular tasks. And if your body is not your ally, then either you need to work with your physiology more empathically to achieve your aims, or learn to decode the signals your body is sending to address your physical needs.

Sort that stuff out, and the business of writing while you want to swim, or swimming when you want to write, will get cleared up. You’ll find yourself doing one or the other, and feeling good about it with a head uncluttered by regrets.

All of this is in the realm of what some people call ‘flow’. What it boils down to is this: the biggest variable in your performance from day to day is the state of consciousness you do stuff in. And the clearer and more honest you can be about your intentions, the easier it is for you to engage all your physical and unconscious resources in the service of your goals.