Lately I've been creatively frustrated.  And surprisingly not due to anything but time constraints!  Anyway here is an article I recently wrote for the Actor's Pulse newsletter which I am sharing with you because every actor will reach a point in their life when they feel a block.

I also urge ALL of you to read Jonah Lehrer's 'Imagine: The Science of Creativity'.  It is pure gold to anyone who wants to create on any level.

‘I was an accomplice in my own frustration’. - Peter Shaffer.

Think about this.  We all get frustrated, we all get annoyed, we all want things - or don’t want the things we have.  What does this mean for Actors? Take a breath, calm down and look at what’s really going on.  Stop blaming that other actor, or the script or the train.

How could we turn our frustration into contentment?  Well, the answer to that question is as individual as how you like your coffee and I am by no means pretending to be a self help book.  

Frustration however is the feeling of dissatisfaction, often caused by unresolved problems or unfulfilled needs.  Frustration in a more everyday sense is the prevention or hindering of a potentially satisfying activity. With such frustration comes emotion.  And with such emotion comes movement.  Let’s think about what this means though in terms of creativity.  A man who more succinctly summed up my argument long before I even knew what I was going to say said ‘The act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process.

Before we can find the answer — before we can even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it’s only after we stop searching that an answer may arrive.’

Don’t you all wish you’d said that?  Frustrating isn’t it! But what a beautiful point.  You will only ever succeed if you know what failure/frustration/struggle/conflict is.  People rarely tell the whole story in terms of success, they often leave out the beginning struggle and the constant setbacks and the times when they just didn’t think that what they wanted was possible.  They skip to the eureka moment and the instant success.  How many times have we all told the happy ‘I won’ moment first, then glazed over the details of the hard journey there?

It is human nature to demonstrate success, but never forget what got you there.

Frustration means you are human, it means you have wants, desires, needs, that you care, and that you want to accomplish something.  This is an excellent quality to possess if you want to be an actor. But we all must learn to harness our frustration and use it to propel us forward into success, and to remember the frustrating times in our creative journey and talk of them fondly to others who choose to walk the same path.