It’s amazing to think that after all these years as a writer, I suddenly had to re-think the process. But there it is. Because I’d lost it--or the desire and joy of writing
seemed lost, and that feels just the same. So I google-searched tips for writers with writer’s block and some best books to try and get out of this hole of feeling like writing was an obligation.
Ok, it felt worse than that. It felt, like an old friend once said, “like holding a refrigerator over my head while the dog pees on my leg”. Ugh.
I have been a writer for a few years, and as such I know that moving past this feeling means I have to push through. It’s just that my entire life has felt like nothing but pushing through for about seven years now. That’s when I decided to do three things at the same time--move away from my home of fifty-five years, open a business and retire (or so I thought).
Yes, wiser people than I advised against it. However, I have never been one to listen to others.
So...life has been a struggle for a while. It doesn’t make it any better that I chose this. I have had periods of less challenge with my life, of course--and during those times my creativity has surged and produced and fulfilled me and I've felt joy.
Over the last year or so with COVID, though, my writing life has felt like slogging through the mud--a series of broken promises to myself, my stories, and my writer friends that slowly but surely bogged me into creative mud that hardened into concrete. I was tired, so tired, of being trapped there. It was time to face the fact that I had to stop getting more cheese to go with my whine and PULL. MYSELF. UP.
So I started following a list of things to do from this article:
The above article contains a lot more than JUST setting a writing schedule. That’s the first thing I needed to do, though: set a schedule and KEEP it.
It’s hard some days. As a business person I almost always have my phone on and my email open, and our clients reach out at ALL hours. When my business started in 2015 I needed to respond before a competitor did. Now, as COVID social distancing has eased, it’s even more important we pick up every new customer we can. However, the siren call of work is best handled these days by my husband and managers--so away from my writing desk my phone goes, with a quick text letting people know I am not available.
I just need one hour a day--one hour.
Soon, I realized that I could put something that has haunted me for years to good use--my insomnia--to help with keeping my writing schedule. Probably not in the way you’re imagining, though. See, I’m a morning person. As I age, I also don’t often sleep for more than six hours at a time--sometimes even less. About noon, though, my energy flags, decision fatigue kicks in and I need a nap--which I generally do now about every day. Even after that, though, my willpower is gone.
SO I started doing my planning, exercising, and writing early, early, early. We’re talking 3 a.m. early. Because that’s when I wake up naturally, now.
I have spent years trying to learn the magic secret of staying asleep longer, but guess what? I’m not supposed to. I’m supposed to get up and write--after a couple of cups of coffee, thank you. The best part is: no one else is awake to distract me at that time!
Yes. Now that’s more like it.
Next, I chose three projects to work on each week. My current novel gets four days, my fanfiction two days, and this blog one. This combination of projects is a nice mix for me since my novel is the most complicated project, my fanfic is just relaxing and my blog is a place where I can let out some of my thinking processes and, hopefully, help someone else.
Outlining and setting deadlines for these three was a bit harder, but I just took a deep breath and dived in--after all, they were mine to change as needed and no one was around to critique. As I’m a planner at heart, I felt better after this--I had a plan!--and I moved on to the next step.
At this point, I realized I might not have what most people think of as “writer’s block”. The section of my novel where I’d gotten stuck was a very dark place--no one would want to go there. But I remembered Stephen King--one of my heroes--writing about a scene in his novel The Shining
that was so scary that even though he knew what was going to happen, he dreaded the morning he entered his study to write it.
Oh, man, do I grok that now.
Nevertheless, I acknowledged that writer’s block had happened to me in the past and might again, so I went ahead and made a plan. I could:
- Open my Writer Emergency Pack or use online prompts
- Free write to generate ideas
- Research--start a list of things to research and work it
- Go to my Writer’s Group’s Slack board and chat with or read the work of my writer friends
Of course I know how to set a word goal and did that.
Now, as to my writing space...we currently live in a tiny adobe house next to our business. My husband and I share a cramped little bedroom as an office, and even though I cleaned off the desk and re-organized it with all of my writing things about a week ago, here’s what’s currently on it.
So, that didn’t go as planned. Do you know what, though? I got over it. I know that I will declutter this space once a week and it will be a zen meditation for me--just as it is in my business office, which is shared by my staff and is even worse.
That’s one of the things I like about being a writer, though. I can just get started and go somewhere else if I wanna.
For my next trick, I was going to have to organize my writing files--oh, the horror!--and rejoin my writer’s group, who’d begun staging interventions to try to get me to come back.
More about that in the next post. In the meantime--what are you doing?
Get writing, will ya?
