When I was a little girl, my mother would walk into my room and ask me what I was doing while I sat on my bed staring into space.

“Thinking,” I would answer.

While I was thinking, my mind was churning out stories of characters encountering monsters in castles or outrunning them on horseback through forests in faraway places. I was the princess, or the girl jockey, or the lost adventurer hiding in the woods from the wicked witch.

“You have a vivid imagination,” my mother would say if I told her what was on my mind. “While you’re thinking, you should clean your room.”

The problem with cleaning my room was that it interrupted my thoughts and put a halt to the stories parading through my brain. I didn’t know how to explain it then, but now I do. Creativity requires focus. And mundane activities like housework require attention to the details of the activity. The two don’t play well together.

To create art in whatever form speaks to you, you need to daydream. You need to free your mind to loosen the flow of thoughts, words, and images, then pluck out the best ones and nurture them.

With writing, you can sometimes indulge your imagination while running your fingers over a keyboard, if you know that keyboard well enough. It had better feel like an extension of your hands, where touching the keys is mindless and you could even drift off to sleep doing it. Otherwise, you’ll need a pen and paper in hand, perhaps even a pencil to let those thoughts lead you on a journey.

But while you and your creative mind are busy searching for the right phrase to convey a complex image, those around you may see you as lazy. At the end of the day, what have you accomplished? You probably piled up some more papers on top of the papers you already had in a pile, or wore down the battery on your phone doing research or checking on your social media platform. At best, you increased your word count.

Does anyone besides you care about your word count? Probably not. When I glance at my to-do list, I realize it’s as long as it was that morning, or longer, and meanwhile those around me are stacking up check marks next to their completed tasks like Santa Clause on Christmas Eve. Perhaps I can count finishing my tea as an accomplishment.

This is the dilemma of trying to live a creative life, especially now when lack of free time carries bragging rights. People are expected to exceed last year’s levels of productivity, not spend time staring at a blank page in a trance. So where can you find the space to sit alone and just think?

Here’s a suggestion: if you keep your fingers moving over your keyboard, no one will know your mind is off wandering through an unexplored landscape. Keep typing keep typing keep typing keep typing—you will look productive instead of like a lazy ass daydreamer. And the words will form thoughts, and the thoughts will start to speak to you, and a world will begin to form in those empty spaces you left for them.  

Let’s keep this a secret just between us creative types.