Dry as… a writing desert
I am lost in a writing desert today. Or perhaps it’s that my brain feels like it’s turned to dust this week. I’ve treated myself to a half-day off work and what was going to be a productive (so I thought) afternoon of writing. I have ideas for a novel I want to throw around into words on the screen, and an outline of an essay I’d like to develop for my Substack, and notes I’m preparing for a talk I’m giving in June. Lots to do, and all I’ve managed so far is two cups of tea, changing the cat litter tray, sweeping the floor (again), checking to see if the laundry is dry yet (it isn’t) and vigorously texting friends and family in a surreptitious attempt to engage in conversation that will distract me from the gloom of having zero ideas, zero imagination and zero inspiration.
Classic case of writers’ block.
I suppose it isn’t writers’ block at all, if such a thing does exist, because as soon as I took to this screen to moan about it, the words started to flow. It’s a form of procrastination, my neurodiverse brain is reaching out for the quickest dopamine hit and while I often get that uplift when writing a verse or two, today it needs something faster and easier. I am not diagnosed as neurodiverse officially, in case anyone was interested, as there is no adult diagnosis service here, but there are a lot of indicators. To find out for certain I would need to pay a private doctor and that is not going to happen without breaking my fragile bank account, but several GPs and a senior psychologist have all said that it’s almost certain and they would recommend…see? I’m instantly reaching out to do something else other than stick to the point of what I am supposed to be concentrating on.
For example, I’ve just disappeared down an internet rabbit hole about something that I saw pop up on social media just now…lost half an hour of my life I’ll never get back.
Does this happen to other writers? Is it just me? I get that i't’s Friday, that I’m tired, that I don’t sleep well and never have, insomnia is like my shadow, always lurking nearby, but I rather hope I’m not alone in this sense of feeling dry, like a river bed in a drought, with just one or two rather weedy thoughts wilting away for lack of any current of inspiration.
So what to do about it? Ideas and tips in the contact page or on an email please!
Since I am one of those ‘get up, get moving and try again’ sort of people, my approach to writing in an ideas desert is exactly that - get going regardless. I’m facing the screen and giving myself permission, as Neil Gaiman put it: to write or do nothing. I can’t sit here doing nothing; for me, complete inactivity is far worse than writing drivel. It works. I am writing, and as I type these words, a small, still-shapeless thought is lurking somewhere behind my left eye that might emerge as a few words of a new poem. It’s as if the physical act of typing, or picking up a pen and writing, stimulates the flow of words, and once these start to come out, regardless of their being jumbled up and a little senseless at first, the dam eventually bursts and the ideas start to flow. I suppose that this is the rationale behind Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” which I’ve never tried but which seem very popular.
In any case, the blank page is not a challenge or a drawback, it is an invitation to write.
The other way I overcome these moments of blank pages, blank screen and blank mind is by walking. The physical movement, the change of scenery, the oxygenating of the blood, the stimulation of the senses on a brisk walk, especially if by the seashore or in the countryside, usually unfetters the brain, distracts it from brooding on what it imagines to be my lack of writing prowess and the pointlessness of trying and instead it begins to dream up new ideas. I find it helps to listen to music as I walk as music nudges the memory, engages emotions and often this will evoke something creative.
Already I feel a little less deserted by my writing mojo. That kernel of a poem, not even words yet, just an impression. a few vague and undefined images, is beginning to push to emerge. I shall simply have to give in and write it into existence.
The blank page invites writing