Hello everyone…
Many times in my 28 years of life, I’ve felt insanely busy. The last month or so has surpassed all those other times.
I was originally planning to talk about another inspiration of mine in this rather late blog post. However, as many writers would likely understand, my motivation just isn’t there to write about that topic right now…
What I do feel ready to write about is writing! And all the things that can stop you from getting it done… Those hurdles that slow you down to a crawl. Writing speed bumps, if you will.
It doesn’t matter what plans you have laid out or good intentions you might have – sometimes reality conspires against you and derails your whole writing mojo.
The Right Headspace
I’m not sure how it is for every writer out there, but for me – I need to be in the proper headspace to write anything creative.
It’s not worthwhile having a spare five minutes here and there. I just can’t sit down and pump out a few paragraphs or pages in that time (useful ones at least). I need to be able to disconnect from everything around me and lose myself into the story.
When life feels overwhelming or chaotic, it can be hard to get into this proper headspace. It’s easy to shrug off writing today and say “I’m sure I’ll be feeling it tomorrow”. But sometimes that doesn’t come and you keep putting it off.
I’ve learnt that for me, I need to force myself to make time and get myself in the right headspace. I need to have had enough sleep and do some activities like watch a show or play a game to detach myself from real life (and the work day).
Despite knowing what I need to try and do to get in the right headspace, it can be very easy to fall back into old patterns and start putting off the writing again.
Procrastination
Ah procrastination…
It’s defined as the act of delaying or putting off tasks until the last minute (or past their deadline). For many writers, like myself, it’s the bane of our existence.
While letting your mind drift to easy activities like TV shows, video games or social media can help you escape life and lead you to a better headspace for writing, it can also serve as an all-consuming distraction that you use as a reason to avoid writing.
I don’t think we should feel pressured to cut these easy activities out of our lives, but we should be mindful of how much time we allow them to take up.
I am more than able to recognise my own procrastination and avoidance of tasks (a.k.a writing!), but that doesn’t make it any easier to overcome. My brain always thinks of reasons to justify the procrastination and before I know it, I’ve justified 3 perfectly good timeslots for writing away.
Once you lose time, there is no going back. There is no do-over.
Time
Time is finite. We only have so much of it. And there are only so many hours available each day.
A lot of those available hours are filled with life things. I’m sure many of us would love to just have each and every day to write away, but we can’t. We’re all juggling a myriad of these important life things all the time.
I’m not saying I want to wish away these life things and to only spend my waking hours writing. Life things are valuable and important, and they make life itself worth living. But I can’t displace the reality that it’s often hard to balance time between life things and writing.
Time is also a crucial factor for getting into the right headspace.
It takes time to disconnect from all the overwhelming life things and get into that magic headspace that allows the words to flow from your fingertips to the page. Time to do that isn’t always available. Even if you do find some time to write, it might not be enough to actually do anything useful. Or, maybe you force yourself to write and end up producing something that was a waste of time anyway.
Too much time between writing hurts your process as well. I’ve written out a chapter, taken a week-long break for one reason or another, and come back to find I don’t remember what I’d actually been writing. Suddenly I find myself spending more time reacquainting myself with my own story than doing the writing I wanted to do!
Despite how hopeless I’ve painted the picture – time, headspace and procrastination are all things you can work on and fix. They can be overcome. But one writing speed bump is harder to move past than others.
Writer’s Block
You’ve probably heard this term thrown around a lot before. It’s defined as a psychological inhibition that prevents a writer from proceeding with a piece of work. It’s an overwhelming feeling of being stuck in the writing process without the ability to move forward and write anything new.
There’s already a lot of information out there about writer’s block, so I won’t go on to repeat everything those other sources have said.
But without a doubt, I’ve found myself stuck in the writer’s block position many times. I might even be there now, though this blog is helping me push past it – as difficult as it has been to write.
My day job is in Communications and even there I sometimes find myself lacking that drive to write anything. If things are hard to write at work, you better believe they’re ten times harder at home when trying to work through my novel – Nash.
Sometimes it just takes time – time to move past what’s blocking you and refocus your attention where it needs to be. The time you need to take can be long though and then we just start running back through all the other issues I’ve talked about in this post.
It feels like an endless cycle sometimes, but it’s all part of the writing game. It’s just another challenge we need to tackle and work through when writing our stories.
Thanks for reading my latest blog everyone. Hopefully I didn’t ramble too much in this one!
At a time when I feel like I’m struggling with all of the above, it really helps to just type it all out and share it. If you’re out there and dealing with similar speed bumps to your writing, please know that you aren’t alone!
Next month, I’m aiming to be back on track with my blogs and hopefully, we’ll be talking about how Christopher Nolan inspired me…
Til next time,
Dean
Space & Lasers 