If you have followed any writers in their blogs or on social media, you will have seen a large number of quotes telling other writers they just need to site and write. Some are more poetic, some are more direct, some are more encouraging, but all essentially say “hey writer, site down to write.”
For those that aren’t writers, this may seem like the most ridiculous command in the history of the world—if you’re a writer, you like to write so wouldn’t you do that?
Yes, we actually would, but there are multiple factors that can detract a writer from their task. The common theme with writers is that we spend a ton of time in our own heads. As I stated before, writing is an act of faith—we have to believe that our project will be worthwhile and attract those that would be interested in it. That faith can waver and be replaced with crippling self-doubt, which we generally have to suppress or find a way to ignore. Many of us are so secretive about our work, particularly at the beginning of a project, that we can’t get the encouragement we need from friends to move forward.
Then, if we can keep our faith high and stick self-doubt in a closet for awhile, we have to make the time to write. That also includes making the time to remind yourself of the last thing you wrote and where you are in the process. And, if your Muses don’t cooperate, then you wonder whether the project will ever be finished (bringing us back to faith again).
There are two schools of thought about what to do in a situation where you know you must contribute to your work in progress but you’re not feeling the work itself. One is that you must push through regardless of how you feel. This, of course, can be torturous. I did this often when I was writing my novel and it feels like I’m walking up a hill of large, pointy rocks while wearing sandals.
Another is to set it aside until you and your Muses align and you can do nothing but type and get everything out of your head onto the page. For me, the problem with this is that my Muses are overly dramatic—if I suppress them, they’ll stay away and the work will never get done. I suspect (although I don’t really know since I don’t know too many writers) that this is the same for other writers. If it weren’t, then we wouldn’t need every living writer to tell other writers to keep writing.
My philosophy is to be somewhere in between. If I’m not able to tap into the Muse that’s helping me write the book on the docket, I think about whether there’s anything else I can write so I can move forward somehow. Most of the time, this feels productive enough. Last week, it was a few pages in the nonfiction book instead of the journal prompt book. Other weeks, it’s two or three blog posts that I can edit and finalize when I need to.
This week, it’s a fourth project or writing prompts that’s been swirling in my head for years but which I haven’t felt the need to do anything about.
Since I started using the label “writer” when I talk to people (whether it’s attached to “technical” or “proposal” or uses no initial adjective), writers of all kinds will pick my brain about aspects of writing. When I was in southern California, there were a lot of budding screenwriters. When I was a freelance editor and copywriter, there were a lot of people who had written books to promote their brand. In many of those cases, there was little I could do to help. These people were looking for encouragement and my response was often that their book needed a lot of work before it could go to an audience. That meant they went to someone else that would tell them their work was ready.
Since I moved to the Pacific Northwest, though, it’s looked a little different. Up here, it’s people who want to write more but don’t know what to write or where to start. Because my life cannot be solely corporate work and writing work, I agreed to start a book club, and there were enough people in the group that were interested in a writing club that I decided to combine the two. Essentially, as I’m reading through the book, I come up with writing prompts that others can use to write on their own. What this has done, though, is made it so that I see writing prompts everywhere—in memes I see online, in the world around me when I’m on a walk, in poems that I see, in research I’m doing for my projects.
This project is rough and isn’t organized at all. Maybe it’s the teacher in me, but there’s clearly a Muse that wants to speak through writing prompts. So, I’ll carry another notebook with me so I can write down prompts as they come to me—or write down topics or statements from the world around me that can inspire numerous prompts that are still forming in my brain.
And, although I got nothing done on the three other books from my 5-year plan, I did get to write and think today so I’ll force myself to call that a win and force down the spinning anxiety about the main project.
Timing is everything!