I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
After my ski accident a week ago, I’ve stalled on book writing. Blogging isn’t coming easy either. It’s possible I could have gotten a concussion, though there were no signs (no loss of consciousness, no dizziness or nausea, no headache). If I did have a concussion it’d be no surprise if I’d lost brain energy.
Or maybe the accident just shocked me enough to throw me off my routine.
Could be this stall is not anything to do with the crash but rather because I’ve gotten to the point that I’m ready to write really powerful things, and i’m hesitating.
Or I’m just lazy?
In What to Do When Your Writing Stalls, Georgia Kreiger calls it The Stall:
I’m writing something, and I think the work is going well. Then, after a while, I’m struck by the feeling what I’m writing is dull and unoriginal, and that it lacks energy. Or I realize that what I’m writing is not the message I intended to convey. It doesn’t measure up to the message that was in my mind before I started typing. I feel the urge to leave my laptop and go empty the dishwasher, or go for a walk, take a nap, read a book, or go pull some weeds from the flowerbed. Even cleaning the bathroom sounds better than forcing myself to keep writing. Then I wonder what ever made me think I was a writer.
Lately I have been calling it The Stall. It’s that regular occurrence that has prevented me from making the progress and reaching the daily page count that I set as the goal for my writing during my summer break.
She quotes advice from Melissa Febos’ Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Febos suggests that resistance is not a bad thing but rather indicates a gateway:
Over the years, I’ve come to look forward to the point in my writing at which continuing seems both incomprehensible and loathsome. That resistance, rather than marking the dead end of the day’s words, marks the beginning of the truly interesting part.
Resistance to writing, Febos suggests, marks the boundary where conventional ideas end:
That resistance is a kind of imaginative prophylactic, a barrier between me and a new idea. It is the end of the ideas that I already had when I came to the page — the exhaustion of narrative threads that were previously sewn into me by sources of varying nefariousness or innocuity.
Crossing that boundary is where she could be totally innovative:
It is on the other side of that threshold that the truly creative awaits me, where I might make something that did not already exist. I just have to punch through that false wall.
Even though I haven’t been writing the book lately I have been studying some philosophy voraciously: Iris Murdoch, Søren Kierkegaard, Sartre and Beauvoir. I’ve been reading Simon Critchley’s book Mysticism. I’ve been listening to Philosophize This! and Converging Conversations podcast episodes.
I know that when I finally do return to the book manuscript, it’s going to be with more interesting and novel ideas.
It’s time for me to punch through some false walls.
A further reason I’ve stalled on Things Men Gave Me is that the stories I have left to write about are more difficult than the ones I’ve already wrote: they are more painful, or potentially cover more sensitive and private topics.
I’m not sure what to do about that. Give up the project, and incorporate those stories into a published book under a pen name? Write the stories anyway, but change the details so they aren’t as private and painful? That would be almost impossible to do without taking away the power of those stories.
In good creative stall breakthrough news, I’ve begun painting again. I started on a painting that might be for a new essay on Things Men Gave Me. It was tentatively titled “Fish and Flowers.” I’m unhappy with it though so I will probably cover it up and start again, maybe with a different concept.
I’m planning to give paintings to my loved ones for Christmas, so I may turn to that project instead.
Sometimes a good way to break a creative stall is to set down whatever you’re working on for a different creative project.