When You Get Stuck And All The Doubts Rush In

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own, Inspiration, On writing, Persist.

Cat Climbing Down Tree

I’ve been stuck on this new story I started working on back in September. I have about 7,000 words so far. Tuesday, a day that happened to be alive in literary influence from the universe, I pushed through some of the crap I’ve been wading through to take a few steps forward. It will require archiving everything I’ve written so far to be a trash bin, to be scavenged along the way.

Part of the problem with this story is that it’s supposed to be out of my stylistic comfort zone. I want it to be. The whole point of writing this new book is to do this new thing I want to do. With any writing project, there will be points where all the fears and doubts rush in, where all of a sudden everything is on the table: that you’re not a real writer (whatever that means); you are wasting your time; you’re a fraud. Why do you keep forcing yourself on the world? Shut up already, and just appreciate all these writers who are clearly much more suited for this work. Or worse: you are warped; your stories are boring.

In the meantime, I’ve been writing more poetry (thanks to Poetry Month for starting that fire). Poetry helps soothe some of the pain of trying to create longer-form works, because they are shorter-form works. While the focus and intensity are turned up to high volume, it doesn’t have to be sustained for quite so long. I’ve also been writing one short story at a time in a collection I’m building up. So, for me, the answer for how to survive the bombardment of fear and doubt is to stay the course. To feel free to tinker with other projects. To free-write. To go for a walk, and let my thoughts about it unspool with my footsteps. To let go of the notion that to be a writer I have to be on top of it all the time, in the flow, moving my work forward. So, one way to survive is simply to stay in the practice, to listen to your inner knowing and not be ruled by pressures that don’t serve the work. Make time and space for the work and really be in it when you are in it. Sometimes this can mean stuckness, boredom, difficulty concentrating. Those moments of struggle are perhaps more important than the easy moments, where things just seem to flow. Be open to change too. We create in a paradox where it is true that there needs to be some pressure on the work, some urgency, some goal we are working toward. So, we impose deadlines and set goals. Those are good things. And those are also the very things that can make us feel stuck and frustrated when maybe we’ve just changed our gait because the part of the work we’ve gotten to or the work we’ve taken on needs us to go a little slower, take a little more care, spend a little bit of time staring at the wall, freewriting about it, talking it out with a trusted friend.

This recent work I’ve embarked on is definitely a reach for me. But I’m going to give it my best. So, I’m starting again from the top and, in the meantime, practicing the craft in shorter forms and in revising two previous works. For this particular work, I’ve realized that I need to spend a little bit of time outside of form and structure just playing around with what it might look like—freewriting about the character—writing a whole lot that may never end up in a book as practice. I also need to do a study of writers who are doing the sort of thing I’m aiming for, which is something the husband recently dubbed “funhouse realism.” I’ve been describing it as “new magical realism”, but that doesn’t quite hit it. This is my moment to try to bend the spoon, and it is really hard. So, I’m going to try to see what they are doing and post about it here, and I’m going to play, work in short form, and edit until I can figure out what the moves are for this one. 

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.