10 Ways to Kick Writer's Block in the Booty

First, and immediately contradicting my title, let’s not call it writer’s block. The word “block” sits like cement in my soul, and instantly conjures that (profoundly scarring) drowning scene from Aladdin. You know the one:

Source (memetic commentary added by yours truly)

OK, so it’s actually a ball and chain for Al, but the association remains strong in my mind. “Block” is just too heavy and impermeable. Besides, when I experience writer’s block, it’s less like slamming into a concrete wall, and more like wandering into a misty valley. My vision closes in and I find myself off-trail and paralyzed by uncertainty. Where did I come from? Where was I going? Where did I leave that bag of gorp (Cotton-Eye Joe)?

In those moments of writer’s fog, I question everything. My ambition is locked by my irrational fear of imperfection. I worry that one misstep will ruin whatever project I’m working on. Panic swells in my chest at the thought that I’ll never straighten out my plot or settle on the right, impactful wording. I see no way forward, and my brain feels too soupy to puzzle out a solution.

But the cool thing about fog is that the sun eventually rises and burns it away (unless you’re in a mysterious, eternally-misty forest, in which case, maybe you have bigger foes to face).

Human brains are all about cycles. You probably know a little about 24-hour circadian rhythms, but you also have ultradian rhythms that repeat within those 24 hours. Our energy fluctuations during the day can be described by ultradian rhythms, and research indicates that our best balance of focus and energy levels throughout the day can be achieved by breaking our “work” time into 90 minute chunks of productivity, followed by a short, 15 minute breaks.

What I’m trying to get at is that we all naturally cycle through different levels of focus and productivity, and while we can coordinate with our cycles to some degree, there will always be periods in your days, weeks, months, years, and beyond that are simply, unavoidably “down.” Your writer’s fog could set in for a few minutes or a few weeks, and while it seems scary and frustrating while you’re lost in the mist, take comfort in the knowledge that it’s a temporary and normal experience.

That said, I do have a few methods to help burn off the fog a little faster. I’ll start with the obvious one that sits at the top of every list like this:

1. JUST WRITE, YOU COWARD

I’m not saying it will be easy. I’m not saying it will be good. But it will force you forward, even if every word you write is garbage that you’ll erase later. That just means you explored a route that didn’t work out, which narrows down the direction you’ll eventually take your work. It doesn’t matter if you feel like you’re just running circles in the fog, because at least you’re running. Plus, you’re practicing your craft, and even when you don’t think practice is improving your performance, neuroscience says it probably is, and you’re making future endeavors easier to tackle.

2. PULL A TAROT CARD

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I’ve been embracing my inner witch lately, and sometimes this witch likes to pull a tarot card to help her view her challenges from new angles. I even draw a card or two when I’m in my fog, like a mini writing prompt when I’m stuck between paragraphs or on tough lines of dialogue. A number of folks have written about using tarot cards as writing prompts not just to get out of the fog, but to guide plots and deepen characters. I use a physical deck for my draws when I can (for the Aesthetic™ of it all), but I also have a free app on my phone. There plenty of free online decks to play with as well.

3. DANCE PARTY

You’re slumped on the couch, folded over yourself as your laptops overworked battery burns your lap, your eyes glazed, with the same line of a Boyz II Men song repeating in your head because of some subliminal connection you made with one of the lyrics while you were deciding between boring steel-cut oatmeal or the irresistible enchantment of magic-hatching dinosaur egg oatmeal at Kroger earlier that day.

You’re stuck, which means it’s time to dance! Throw on some jams and get wild! Not only are you shifting your attention and giving yourself a little break (which we talked about earlier as being a normal and necessary component of productivity), but exercise stimulates the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that deals directly with focus, concentration, organization, and planning… All things that you need to get back in the writing zone.

4. TALK IT OUT

When you’re buried in your own writing process, it helps to bring other people into your world to help dig you out. Call a parent or sibling and chat about what you’re stuck on. Trap your significant other in a car with you and ramble about what you have so far, and where you want to go next. Join a writing group! Make a post on a writer’s forum! Line up your collection of antique, porcelain, totally not haunted dolls and show them a PowerPoint presentation about your fledgling novel! It’s lovely if your audience has input (as long as we’re not still talking about those porcelain dolls), but even if they don’t, the simple act of vocalizing your concerns can help you work through your problem.

5. MEDITATE

Everyone knows that meditation is a scientifically supported method of improving apparently every aspect of your life. And I was like, pffffft, yeah, OK, science is a liar sometimes. And then I downloaded an app to try some guided meditations and… it actually does seem to help? I use meditation to manage my anxiety, help me sleep, and handle moments of extreme emotion. More and more, I’m also using it to shift myself from “work mode” to “creative mode” after I get home from the office. A 5 to 10 minute meditation refreshes and relaxes me, and while I haven’t specifically tested it out on writer’s fog yet, it seems like just the sort of thing to clear the air and get my focus back.

6. EAT BRAIN FOOD

My most hypocritical suggestion is to eat stuff your brain likes. Well, not the pleasure centers of your brain that evolution has taught to repeat “SWEET THING TASTE GOOD; EAT MORE TO SURVIVE WINTER”, but your actual neuroarchitecture. Foods like blueberries, salmon, spinach, and beets can boost your brain in both the short and long terms. It’s harder to get trapped in writer’s fog when you’re taking action to keep general brain fog at bay.

To immediately bolster your focus and improve your chances of defeating the fog, try a snack of a square of dark chocolate and cup of green tea when you’re feeling slumpy.

7. TREAT YO SELF

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Not a fan of my spinach solution? No sweat! Sometimes, you need to prioritize your emotional health in order to move forward.

My writer’s fog often sets in when I’m feeling extra stressed. I panic and tell myself to work harder, but that’s not always the solution. When I’ve tried my other in-the-moment methods of resolving the fog and am hitting a wall, I give myself permission to relax and do something that makes me feel good. Maybe that’s hiking, or maybe it’s playing a video game, or maybe it’s detonating a bath bomb and applying a charcoal mask. Whatever it is, it’s a way to lift my own spirits so I can return to the battlefield refreshed and emotionally prepared to try again.

(Of course, it’s tempting to rely on this option to avoid writing… Be mindful of whether you’re practicing self-care or just procrastinating.)

8. SHIFT YOUR CREATIVE FOCUS

No writer is just a writer (and everyone is a writer or storyteller, by the way). You are a creative force, and just because your writing is stuck doesn’t mean the rest of your talents are too. Feel free to switch it up. If you write prose, try poetry. Better yet, toss word-based creativity aside, buy a cheap paint set, and go to town! If you play an instrument, spend some time practicing or composing. Heck, get your hands on some playdough and sculpt fake food just for funsies, and then lick your fake food to confirm that yes, playdough still tastes like salt and toddler hands.

Don’t worry about quality. Don’t worry about purpose. This is about letting your creative juices flow, even if that entails inventing a new and terrible kind of grilled sandwich, because if a calamari and cottage cheese panini isn’t creative expression, then what is it? An abomination, obviously. Still, the point stands.

9. SET THE MOOD

Creating a writing-focused setting for yourself is critical in terms of beating and preventing writer’s fog. If you usually write propped up in bed, try making it a little more formal by writing at a desk or table. Take control of your environment by clearing the clutter. After all, a messy work-space has a negative relationship with productivity.

Perhaps most important of all: treat your writing seriously by giving it a specific, uninterrupted block of time. Even if you can only set aside 10 minutes each day, dedicate that time exclusively to writing. That means no checking Reddit between paragraphs or texting your boo to complain about the problematic meme you saw when you weren’t supposed to be looking at Reddit. The muses are jealous hoes. They’re not going to help you if you ignore them on dates and text other people.

All of this mood-setting has long-term benefits, too. You’re training your brain to focus longer and to pick up environmental cues (the desk, the time of day, etc.) that signal it’s time to write.

10. FORGIVE YOURSELF

You can try all these techniques and more and still find yourself stuck, and that’s OK. That’s normal and expected. You aren’t any less of a writer for losing yourself in the fog now and then. First, forgive yourself for that.

Second, forgive yourself for imperfection.

The single biggest hindrance to my own writing has been my fear of making mistakes and looking foolish. The writing process is messy and complex, and it’s so easy to look at a first (or second, or third, or fourth) draft and cringe at the jumbled yuck of it all. Nothing discourages quite as potently as your own biased self-critique.

Accept that your writing is never going to be perfect, because no one’s is. We’re humans. we’re MADE out of jumbled yuck. As a creative person, you’ve probably spent a lot of your life looking at your own yuck under a microscope, and that can really skew your perspective. It’s great that you want to analyze your imperfections and improve yourself, but don’t let that stop you from getting out there. Take it from my favorite fictional teacher:

Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!

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Useful Writing Junk 3: The Virtue of Repetition

Hold up... this is only my third Useful Writing Junk? Yikes. What kinda seat-of-the-pants blog am I running here? Don't answer that. My ego can't handle the truth.

So much in writing (and any creative endeavor) revolves around the ego. It takes a degree of narcissism to say to yourself, "I have a story to tell, and by gum, people are gonna want to hear it." And yet, contradiction of contradictions, creators of all kinds can have such fragile self-esteems. It's what chokes us back and stops us from sharing all the things we want to share. Once we do put our work out there, it's what keeps us clinging to every Amazon review, every fluctuation in website traffic, every offhand comment from a family friend.

Creators need constant reassurance about their work, even when they feel in their souls that their creations are valuable and good. Or, they feel that way just enough of the time to justify making their work public. Need a source on that? Talk to my poor, long-suffering wife about all the times I've snuggled up against her in bed at O dark thirty and demanded to know if she thinks I'm a good writer.

There's a reason for this dichotomy, and Ira Glass sums it up pretty terrifically in a 2009 interview. Check out his words in motion in Daniel Sax's short film (and click here for a transcript and some additional info):

In summary: creators enter the game because they have good taste, but it takes practice and practice and practice for their work to live up to their own standards. 

I have this friend. She is intelligent and observant and creative and has incredible taste. I know her taste is great because of the interesting podcasts she's introduced to me, and the diverse array of books on her shelves, and her strangely intimidating streak of perfectionism while recreating a Bob Ross landscape. 

Why, would you look at that. Source

She's considering writing a story, because she has a number of stories floating around in her inner world, and is ready to bring them out. However, that involves exposing some ego. Like I said, the girl is hecka smart, and knows what she's getting into. She knows that the content she's starting out with will not meet her high expectations. It's frustrating enough to shut down everyone but the most tenacious (and/or most foolish). 

Her brain does to her what mine does to me, and it's what tons of artist brains do. We write a little bit, recoil in horror when it isn't the perfect thing our egos believe it should be, and have to talk ourselves back from the ledge. Giving up on our writing starts to look really appetizing and really safe. It feels better to say, "I'm a crappy writer and I'll never be able to do this" than to say "I need to keep working and working and failing in front of everyone until I like my writing enough not to puke on it."

But like Radio God Ira Glass says, we just need time to catch up. We need to build up a mountain of work, and hopefully within that mountain a diamond will form. 

I had lunch with another friend this weekend, and she mentioned that she and her mother read my first (and currently only) novel, Necessaries. I duck-taped my ego to the back of my mind and asked what they honestly thought. She said it was funny, comparing it to the witty writings of Douglas Adams, which was nearly enough for my ego to bust through the duck-tape forcefield and scream in triumph. But she also admitted that she and her mother could tell it was a first novel. 

And it's true. Necessaries is an open wound of a book, in some ways. When I published it, I knew I wasn't completely satisfied (but let's be real: I'm never going to be satisfied with my own work). However, I wanted to toss it into the world, as if it were an anchor and the world were the sea, and the anchor line was wrapped around my leg, and... OK, so, the metaphor is that I forced myself into the deep end, knowing I might crush my pride in the process. 

But now it's out there. It's the first lump of a foothill on the road to my eventual mountain of work. There are things I love about it. There are many more things that I know I can improve with enough repetition. 

The takeaway on this weird third edition of UWJ (oooge?) is that sometimes the best thing you can do for your writing is to keep doing it and ignore the protests of your ego. Given enough practice and quantity, you'll start to close the gap between your creations and your taste.

I'll leave you with this excerpt from David Bayles and Ted Orland's Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking:

“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an “A”.

Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”

Thanks for reading my pounds of writing, and I hope you go forth and produce pounds of writing yourself.

Psalm of the Kitchen

Every meal is a prayer. I've learned the meditation of a pot of water not yet boiling. I frame the altar of my stove with talismans of spice and oil. The touch of the steam is like the touch of a spirit, warm but fleeting, anointing my palm with moisture that evaporates as I pull away.

The concept of the kitchen as a cathedral is not a new one. We've sensed the spirituality inherent to eating and preparing to eat since our ancestors first stood on two legs and wandered the tall grass, gathering shared resources with evolutionarily repurposed arms. Food unites. Food restores. We are all members of its congregation.

It's as a congregation that my family stands around me in our most ancient sanctuary. I sizzle onions and garlic in a dark pan, and we call out songs to play, a tap away on our phones. The water shushes over plates in the sink as we wash them, and they clink and scrape together, and it's music, too. My sister chops vegetables, shuck, shuck on the cutting board. My love reads instructions to me from that holy tome, the cookbook, and the dogs click claws across the tile. We exist in this moment more than we've existed anytime else in the day. Right now, we are participating in the universe.

Most sacred to me are the times I worship alone. Some of those days, I hear my family in the next room, their voices indistinct and tumbling over each other, lifting in laughter, quieting, continuing. I don't need to know their words. I am satisfied knowing their presence.

Some days, the next room is silent and empty, and I cherish that as well. I whisper invented hymns as the burner tick tick ticks. I rub salt between my fingertips. There is a powdery smell to pasta when it hits the bubbling water, even when it's the cheap macaroni I buy in bulk because I'm afraid of the day that my family will be hungry and our cupboards will be empty. 

But it's not this day. Today, I can fold stringy, melting cheddar into the noodles and add a dash of cayenne, just because I can, just because it's there. Though the meal is cheap, it will taste like a miracle, because my loves will wake up to hot food from their cold sleep.

I pray that I can always do this. I pray that I can protect us with a stirring spoon. I pray that I will always hear voices in the other room. 

We cup warm bowls in our hands and bow our heads. 

The truest god I know dwells in this communion.

Kinda Campy

I didn't know this was a thing, but it turns out, this thing is totally a thing.

What thing? Camp NaNoWriMo!

I'm cheerchime on NaNo sites (so come say hi to me and be my buddy!!!!!)

If you're familiar with me, you're probably familiar with National Novel Writing Month, AKA, NaNoWriMo. It takes place in November and it challenges participants to write a novel in a month (50,000 words worth, to be precise). 

I just learned about Camp NaNoWriMo, which takes place in April. It's like a nano-NaNo (haha, get it? Nano, like tiny? I'm sorry.). You set your own goals, which is nice, because a full 50,000 words is NOT gonna happen for me this month. You also get placed in a virtual cabin of writing mates, which is adorable. The folks in my cabin are already introducing themselves and their projects, which include editing short story collections, finishing a novel started last November, and writing an online course.

This month, I'm going to try to write 10,000 words for Resolution. It's a low goal, but it's more than I've written for the story so far. I'm also taking a very important financial planning course, so I don't want to overextend myself and jeopardize my studies!

So, if you have any kind of writing project you're working on, you should give Camp NaNoWriMo a shot! It can be as big or as small a challenge as you'd like it to be. If you decide to do it, let me know, and we can cheer each other on! 

Happy writing, everyone!

The Great Grey Beast February

The sun may be shining and my wife may be wearing shorts (when isn't she?), but it's still winter in the Midwest. Clive Barker describes this ugly month as a great grey beast in The Thief of Always, and I've never heard a more apt description. 

Billie and Binx agree.

Last night, after I finished whining about a persistent, yellow-glowstar-snot cold that I've been trying haplessly to overcome, Kelsey observed that this is the time of year in which there's nothing to look forward to. The good holidays are in the rear-view mirror, our work schedules have come unsynchronized, and the cheery colors of spring look so far away.

In the past, I've had a lot of trouble with this part of winter, and I either overcompensate for my misery or let the great grey beast swallow me like it did Harvey Swick. My timehop app informs me that last year, I was in full overcompensation mode. Around this time, I published Necessaries and was taking it to workshops and a book signing and had started a GoFundMe to raise money for a booth at Pride. On top of that, Kelsey and I were planning our wedding. The future was radiant.

As for this year? There are definitely some beacons of hope on our calendar, including a much-anticipated wedding for some good friends of ours. Heck, as I've been drafting this post, I received an email notifying me that my bridesmaid (bridesmatron?) dress is ready for pick-up, and I'm pretty jazzed about that. I also have some painting commissions that will be fun to complete. Check out this one, the first I'd done in about a year:

It was a Christmas gift for the aforementioned betrothed, actually. They have such marvelous furbabies.

But the weight of the winter is still pressing down on this household. I've been more stressed and anxious than usual, fretting over bills and deadlines and a financial planning course that often makes me feel like an ignoramus. On top of that, there's the whole thing with our president ushering in the apocalypse and whatever. I worry about not doing enough, not saying enough, but when I see the horrors unfold, my heartrate spikes and I have to take a timeout to re-collar my rampant anxiety.

Historically, I've used writing to calm my nerves, and I've been doing that non-stop in any free moment since last summer, but in a very strange way. After publishing Necessaries, I got a bit anxious about the future of my writing. I have one project that I really love that isn't working the way I want it to, and another that I've thoroughly plotted but haven't made much creative headway with. I decided to set those projects gently to the side and write something completely different to get back in the groove. Something to experiment with some character-types I'll be using in another story. Something low-pressure, high-reward. Something quite ridiculous.

It was supposed to be small. It is now about the length of Necessaries. 

I accidentally wrote a free three-part novel under a pseudonym that, for reasons you'll quickly understand, can never be published. And, since it's out there, I thought I may as well share it with you, in case it helps you to withstand February as it's done for me.

But I'm neurotic and self-conscious, so if you want to know why I'm being a secretive weirdo about this side-project that has devoured my creative resources for half a year, you'll have to search for the answer yourself. I've hidden an Easter egg on my website. Well, I didn't do a great job of hiding it, but it's here somewhere. It will take you to my accidental novel.

Why did I do this? I don't know. I think I needed something that didn't have the same weight riding on it as my usual writing does (not that there's actually that much pressure there). I got addicted to getting feedback for this story, and I think that's why I've let it turn Audrey II on me. So many people are enjoying this story, and if I can bring a little sunshine to their lives during these batty times, that's worth something! 

Anyway, my real books haven't been neglected, and I'm coming up with a schedule for myself in which I can balance my various projects, hobbies, and studies. Whatever I do, I want it to make people happy, and make me happy, too.

Take that, February.