I have a client who developed an outline for her novel a couple of months ago. It has a lot of single action short chapters. Today I received an email from her: I’m stuck. I was writing three chapters a week before I went home for vacation. And I want to set a goal of four. But now I can’t get back in gear. Here’s my brief response to her, since I’m away assisting Laura Davis at her writing retreat:

Don’t push. When your psyche has digested whatever it’s chewing on, it will start up again. Quite on its own.

“Home” – the place we grew up and the people we grew up with – can grind down our sense of self and our hard-won capacities, when we return for a visit. All of us tend to revert to earlier ways of being and reacting when we’re with the people we knew in the past – especially early in our lives, more especially family (who forget that we have changed, whether they have or not), and most especially when we are immigrants and have become someone we might have been unable to even conceptualize twenty years ago. (In a sense we are all immigrants in time – our world is changing so quickly that we might not have been able to conceptualize twenty years ago who we are so comfortable being now – even if we live in the same apartment we did then. Could you have conceived of the impact on your life of your textable cell phone?)

Before being free to move forward as our familiar participatory self, we need to shift out of our regression or reaction to the exposure to our past. We need to catch up with all the daily accumulations that went untended. To adjust to time zone and climate changes. To put away our travel things, report our adventures to friends and confidants, reestablish the rhythm of our daily lives. And we have to assess how we were impacted by the trip, perhaps journal about insights or talk them through with a counselor. Our psyches need to fall back into our comfortable zone – unless our writing comes from the angst or discomfort of the moment. (The romantic era image: the lunatic/reclusive writer in the attic, too sensitive to interface with their contemporary world.)

This is a process that requires its own time, and the less we’ve worked on our psychological structures, the longer it’s likely to take.

Don’t let your inner critic make the process harder by setting a four chapter goal. You are very prolific, so trust that to return. The problem is compounded when we impose an expectation on ourself that we should meet a (usually arbitrary) deadline. What is the reality of the deadline? Who imposed it? What is your part in subscribing to it when it is making your life harder?

I offered her some guidelines for allowing the personal process to work itself out without relinquishing focus on her manuscript: I suggest you go back and read what you’ve written. It will put you in the frame of mind of the story, reconnect you with your voice. Or you can start editing what you’ve written and continue that process either until you get to the end of what’s completed – and that should put you squarely in the middle of the energy – or at one moment you will feel reconnected, so you can jump forward to where you left off.

Put your critical eye – not your inner critic – to work to refine the writing you’ve already done. I usually recommend writing straight through until the first draft is complete – moving your concepts into manifested form by blurting them out on the page without an evaluation. The distinctive and appropriate voice of the piece is likely to show up about a third of the way through the content (if you relax into the rhythm of writing).

When you are stuck, editing from the beginning can shape that voice into coherency. When you arrive at where you left off, you will find yourself ensconced in the material, fluent in your voice, and ripe for plowing onward at your easy pace again.

Delight in the process. Lie in a hammock and let images of the book unfold. Unhook from the Should.

A great way to break the block is free writing to open the weir that dams your creative, imaginative flow. Search for writing prompts online and choose any one that grabs your attention. Decide in advance whether to write for ten or fifteen minutes. If you come to the end of a thought, write the prompt again and let the next thread unwind. Don’t let your hand stop moving until the time is up.

Here are a few samples:

What my kitchen table knows
The fear that never lets me rest
The picture I can’t forget

You can also subscribe to Laura’s weekly prompt and join the international community of writers who post their responses there. Taking half an hour to read some of the responses is liable to inspire you to post your own.

Until next time, delight in the process.

Download as PDF: Writer’s Nightmare #1 – Being Stuck