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When your writing life is a bit cloudy or filled with rain, what do you do to dig down and keep on writing?

Hey, now – No one said these questions were going to get personal.

I think it depends on HOW is my writing life cloudy – Are we talking about “I have no ideas to write” or more of a “I have no bandwidth to spare for this noise” kind of thing? Because there are different reasons for why one gets bogged down and different strategies to apply for what one does to get out of the bog.

Sometimes I can switch gears and look at something else in a different genre I’m writing. After all “All writing helps all writing” (shamelessly plagiarized from F.P. Dorchak’s signature block). Sometimes that’s enough to shake things loose on the original problem.

Sometimes I get bogged down because I’m trying to force the story to go in this original direction and it just won’t work. It’s hard to admit that while the plan works logically, it doesn’t work creatively. Sometimes you have to just chuck the plan and do the opposite, just to see what happens. I once had a character who was originally supposed to die but it just wouldn’t work, no matter how logical the flow of events were. I eventually just decided to write out what would happen if I let him live instead and that made things WAY easy and more interesting.

Sometimes you’re just tired. Just deep to the bone tired. So tired you couldn’t give a damn even if you wanted to and writing is nothing but a chore, not a joy. In those cases, I bundle everything up and put it away for a bit and do something non-writing to clear away the cobwebs or whatever it is that I’m dealing with. I hope it only takes a few days, but more often than not it takes longer. Much longer. But I suppose that isn’t really continuing to write when you don’t want to. During these periods I do research – I read and take notes and put those notes in the appropriate files (if I’m being good and remember to do so). Sometimes small scenes come out of these “non-writing” times and get written down – whether or not they get used is a completely different question.

Then there are the times when the bandwidth just isn’t there. There is too much going on in the real world that my mind is cycling on for me to be able to switch gears into my writing work. It sounds like a lame excuse, I know, but it is true – if you’re wrapped up in Cub Scouts and Dance Mom and Choir Practice and Summer Plans and ShitTheTubLeaksNowIHaveToFixThatToo and Tutoring and keeping a house that doesn’t turn into a bio-hazard and CrapWeNeedToHaveATalkAboutTheBirdsAndTheBeesAtAge*9* on and on and on… Well, you’ve just got too many tabs open in the brain to work on something else, and some of those tabs are not easy to close (Jesus, Ishtar and Bhuddha, the pop-ups on the house tab alone just never stop…).

It’s my thought that the reason you’re stuck is what determines how you get unstuck, and in my experience (small though it is) just trying to push through it like a gym workout doesn’t usually get the best results. Every solution needs to be tailored to the problem.

So I guess I’m a bit of a slacker after re-reading this, but most times I have to let the clouds and rain do their thing and just wait it out with a map and a baggie of trail mix before I can start back up again.

Check out the Insecure Writer’s Support Group to see more writers dish about their concerns, their solutions to various problems, or just general kleptophobia.