A Creation Station is a helpful place or space for you to do your best creating. Recently, a friend of ours was cleaning out their home office to make a nursery for their soon-to-come new addition. As she was doing so, their young daughter decided to make her own Creation Station filled with idea notebooks and recycled materials. While she was creating the space, she hung up the “Heart for Art” award she got from school. It was “for displaying great enthusiasm and passion for visual arts.”

As the little girl was putting together her Creation Station, complete with an award for her art, she said:

“Whenever I think I can’t make something I’ll just look at this and know I earned it because I can do it; just be creative!”

You can do it, too. Just be creative. And it’s easier to do so if you create space for you to do it. Space isn’t just an area or expanse where you do your creating. It is also space on your calendar. And it is space in your brain.

Here’s how to make your own Creation Station:

1. Make a space. Your Creation Station should be a place that inspires and motivates you. One of my least motivating places is my office at church. I find that there are far too many interruptions to get much time for deep, creative thinking. I need a place that inspires and motivates me, so I do most of my writing at a table in our eating area at home. I like to have the door open, and often have instrumental music playing. Music with words is too distracting to me. Another place that I create well is in a public place like a coffee shop or a Panera restaurant. You’d think the noises in those places would distract me, but they don’t. They energize me. If your creativity involves painting or other messy pursuits, you’ll probably have to make your space at home. But when you do, you are more free to surround yourself with art, pictures, or quotations that inspire you and motivate you to create. Creation Stations aren’t just for kids.
2. Make time. Your Creation Station needs to be on your calendar. Creativity takes time. Sometimes it takes “empty” time, where you just do some thinking, or even something unrelated to your creative pursuit. Doing things unrelated to my writing are often the times I come up with my best ideas. But when I have the idea I need the time. I don’t want to just find the time. I want the time actually scheduled into my calendar so that it becomes an appointment just like anything else on my calendar. When it’s there, I take it seriously and use the time for making and creating.
3. Make room in your brain. Your Creation Station starts first in your brain. You know that cluttered closet way back in your brain, with the door shut and dust collecting everywhere? It’s time to open that door, clear out the clutter, remember the times from days gone by when you were creative (because we all were), and make that old closet a Creation Station in your head. Watch a movie. Read books both inside and outside your area of creativity. Go to a museum and spend an hour taking it in. Attend a concert. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron says that you should take yourself on “artist’s dates” at least once a week, by yourself, to fill your creative reserves with material. You never know how these dates and times will inspire you or give you material when you most need it.

It doesn’t take much to make your own Creation Station. So when you do, remind yourself to “just be creative,” like our little friend. You can do it.

Where is your Creation Station?