There are periods in life where craft becomes more of a challenge, more of an effort, more of an annoyance and, worse yet, less enjoyable. Art is less of a passion and more of a burden. Whether this is a period brought on by your creative process — too many pieces you don’t like, too many rejections, or too many blank pages — or it’s brought on by your life — too much work, too much anxiety, or too little time — it’s a difficult time. Depending on how much your art means to you, it’s a downright dreadful time.
I’m not ashamed to admit it; I was experiencing one of those. I had fallen into a writing rut. I was suffering from writer’s block or, as I like to refer to it, the Black Death. It happens. Sometimes writing can be rough. Sometimes it can be downright fickle. For the last year, on and off, writing has been my frenemy.
So, I decided it was time to do something about that. And thus began a self-imposed journey to end the suffering.
In November, I considered doing NaNoWriMo. For those of you who don’t know, NaNoWriMo is an annual writing project, meant to challenge amateur and professionals authors alike to write a novel in a month. It seemed to me that a challenge might be a good jumpstart, but I am not the type of person who likes to fail.
Attempting a challenge and falling short doesn’t leave me with a “that was a good attempt, I’m proud of where I got and there’s always next time” outlook. For me, at the end of the day, writing is not a competition or something you can fail at, but NaNoWriMo is a platform that counts page numbers, not quality or enjoyment in the process. Where that can be fun if you’re in the right mindset, I feared that something like that would only deepen my rut, and so I moved on to another idea: revising.
If I couldn’t write something new and like it I could surely fix something old right? Wrong. I think perhaps this is the worst thing I could have done. Looking at my old work was like a reminder of everything wrong. These were pieces written because there was a deadline, pieces that were abandoned halfway, and pieces I didn’t like from the start that made it to completion.
I wanted to get the juices flowing on something new and instead I buried myself in the exact thing that made me and writing enter a rough patch in the first place.
Then I came to the idea of keeping a journal. Not a very original concept. I’m sure any creative writing teacher I’ve ever had has told me to keep a journal — “at least you’re writing” — but this didn’t work either. I don’t know about you, but when I’m going through a particularly rough patch in my life I don’t want to document it. When I do everything reads like a whiny, angry, aggressive, sad mess. It acted as a further reminder of everything I wanted to forget and making that tentative connection between writing and my life struggles only made the two seem interchangeable. Again, the journal only ended in a deeper ditch.
So I reverted to an old-school classic: stream of consciousness writing, writing about anything. Writing for as long or as briefly as I wanted. And that seemed to work for a while, but the same questions came to reappear in the back of my head. So what? Who cares? What should I write about now? The inner critic had shown its ugly face again and that’s when (enter a chorus of "Hallelujah") I found "Complete the Story" and "303 Writing Prompts" in the Bargain Books pile.
I cannot express my thanks and gratitude to these books enough. They aren’t “how to” books. No mildly successful author is preaching to you about the significances of writing every day, or on how to eliminate your inhibitions. They’re just writing prompts, pages upon pages of completely random topics. Excerpts that get me outside of my own head, things I never dreamed of writing about, and that’s the exact kind of freedom I was looking for in order to write every day. Topics that did not have to uphold the emotional burden of honest nonfiction, or develop humanity in fictional characters; just prompts that got me writing again.
And let me tell you, the freedom is nice.
