stuck in the mud
and some wise words from others to help with dislodging
Hello friends 🍵🏰
Recently I’ve been in a bit of a writing bog. It’s pretty unpleasant. What’s worse is I kinda knew this would happen, since it happened twice last year. I had thought maybe I could escape the bog this time. Alas, I was naive. As before, I made an attempt on a long project, got to roughly the 10k word mark, then had three very strong negative feelings:
I have no idea where to go from here. I can see other parts of the story, some of them quite clearly, but the next few scenes seem absolutely insurmountable.
I’m [expletive] bored. I don’t like the sentences. My characters feel like puppets without articulating limbs. I’m just describing things to invent them and it feels too much like wrangling the story. The process has become joyless. It’s like I’m writing a manual or something.
I can’t believe this is happening again. Why do I suck so badly at this? Or, in my more self-pitying moments: why is this happening to me?
It really, really feels like slamming into a wall.
I’ve described it to friends as “I’m annoyed at writing,” but when I inspect that feeling more closely I’m just annoyed at myself. And disappointed, because I feel like I should be getting this right. I know how this goes. I understand doing the thing will teach me how to do the thing. And I feel like I have all the tools at my disposal, or at least, I don’t think taking another class or reading another book will somehow give me the answer. They might unlock a few ideas, but those will be moot unless I can actually, somehow, make myself write.
Even for this specific dilemma, of I don’t know what should happen in this scene, I’ve received a lot of excellent advice. Trying different scenarios! Leaning into the characters! Doing the version that delivers the greatest amount of UST! This is all great. I’ve even tried some of them, in a very slapdash fashion. But my brain isn’t cooperating. It’s trying to avoid the mess and agony of the rest of the writing process, probably. It keeps yelling abandon ship!!
I am pleased to report that something has changed compared to the last two times this happened, though. When my brain bleats abandon ship!! a second thought now immediately follows—no, I can’t. I’ve poured too much into this particular project. It has nearly all the elements already: characters I care a lot about, textures for the world that have come from weeks of reading and thinking and research, and several very good answers for why is this the story you want to write. There’s so much I still don’t know, but the story has its claws in me. I just need to find the right tone, the right way in, at least to get (re?)started on this draft.
It’s a relief, to cling to that no, I can’t.
Because it signals to me that I’ll write this somehow. From where I’m standing it seems impossible…but also inevitable. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I desperately hope it’s true.
I took this in 2015 when I visited Edinburgh for the first time and hiked Arthur’s Seat. It’s not a wild hike, but for my fitness level at that time there were definitely points when I was like I’m going to get to the top…how? It probably didn’t help that I was wearing sneakers with no traction. Again, a pretty heavy-handed metaphor for the writing process.
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Anyway I didn’t want this whole newsletter to be complaining. Dear reader: in case you, too, are stuck in a bog, here are some ideas by some very smart people that I’ve found to be helpful.
Van Gogh on Process
You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves.
Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas IS AFRAID of the truly passionate painter who dares—and who has once broken the spell of “you can’t.”
Nick Cave, in response to the question, what do you do when the lyrics just aren’t coming?
In my experience, lyrics are almost always seemingly just not coming. This is the tearful ground zero of song writing—at least for some of us. This lack of motion, this sense of suspended powerlessness, can feel extraordinarily desperate for a song-writer. But the thing you must hold on to through these difficult periods, as hard as it may be, is this—when something’s not coming, it’s coming. It took me many years to learn this, and to this day I have trouble remembering.
The idea of lyrics ‘not coming’ is basically a category error. What we are talking about is not a period of ‘not coming’ but a period of ‘not arriving.’ The lyrics are always coming. They are always pending. They are always on their way toward us. But often they must journey a great distance and over vast stretches of time to get there. They advance through the rugged terrains of lived experience, battling to arrive at the end of our pen.
[O]ur task is both simple and extraordinarily difficult. Our task is to remain patient and vigilant and to not lose heart—for we are the destination. We are the portals from which the idea explodes, forced forth by its yearning to arrive. We are the revelators, the living instruments through which the idea announces itself—the flourishing and the blooming—but we are also the waiting and the wondering and the worrying. We are all of these things—we are the songwriters.
Anne Lamott, from the brilliant Bird by Bird, which I am rereading:
i.
I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.
ii.
I wish I had a secret I could let you in on, some formula my father passed on to me in a whisper just before he died, some code word that has enabled me to sit at my desk and land flights of creative inspiration like an air-traffic controller. But I don’t. All I know is that the process is pretty much the same for almost everyone I know. The good news is that some days it feels like you just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it. It is a little like when you have something difficult to discuss with someone, and as you go to do it, you hope and pray that the right words will come if only you show up and make a stab at it.
And often the right words do come, and you—well—“write” for a while; you put a lot of thoughts down on paper. But the bad news is that if you’re at all like me, you’ll probably read over what you’ve written and spend the rest of the day obsessing, and praying that you do not die before you can completely rewrite or destroy what you have written, lest the eagerly waiting world learn how bad your first drafts are.
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I’m hopeful that the next time I write you I’ll have made some forward progress again. I do think I’ll have to scrap the 10k, but nothing is ever wasted. I invented a bunch of characters in that sequence, and I got to see my world a little more clearly. I have to find an approach to the story (in the structure? the prose? I don’t know yet) that’s a little more amusing to me than it currently is…but we’ll get there.
God, I hope we get there.
Mechanically I understand how it could happen; I know quite a lot about my own process, after all. But part of what I know is that it’s never worked for anything very long before, so there’s a lot to this that I have to just grind through and teach myself. Hopefully there’ll be some bright spots in that wandering, too.
If, like me, you’re stuck in the mud with something—hey, we can do this. Let’s squirm out together.
I don’t think this was the view from the top of Arthur’s Seat…but it certainly is higher than the picture taken earlier, and there’s a real satisfaction in that.
Events and things
Last Saturday I got to chat with Usman Malik, Shveta Thakrar, and Rohama Malik as part of The Desi Collective’s Writers Block Party. If you missed it and would like to watch, the recording is available (free and public) here on Facebook.
Also, my story Only Unclench Your Hand, about mambabarang (bug sorcerors!) and realizing one’s privilege in the probinsya came out on audio for the first time earlier this month! You can listen to it at Serialbox.
Finally—hey, if you’re a US citizen and are eligible to vote, please vote! It’s such an important thing to do, especially this year. I’m not an eligible voter, so I’m earnestly asking those of you who can to please do so (I mean, I suspect I’m preaching to the choir, but still.) 🙏
Thanks as always for reading! If you liked this post, feel free to share it with others, or sign up if you haven’t yet. If you have a story to share about getting unstuck, please do! If you have questions for this newsletter, I’d love to answer them—you can submit them here.
yay, also stuck in the mud here. go team! thanks for sharing these little inspiration blurbs.