A creative writing rut can take several forms, so we’re unpacking all of them. Missed the first post? Here it is below.
One thing I’ve noticed about myself and have seen affirmed in books like Do Nothing is that we’re obsessed with being busy. Well, maybe not all of us, but overachievers who were programmed without any inherent value or self-esteem, like me, certainly equate their worth to how much they produce. (Whether it’s words or money or cookies or influencer videos or whatever.) More is always more, and more is better, right?
Well, not always. If you really slow down and pay attention, you might notice that people are always talking about how busy they are. It’s like a pissing contest. I admit to participating wholeheartedly (and not only participating, but going for the gold). Yesterday, I responded to an email from June 2023 in a manic email inbox spree to finally get current. (To everyone who has ever emailed me, I’m so sorry, but I will never be faster. I’m like the bear who climbed the mountain to see what he could see, only to see the other side of the mountain. And the mountain beyond.)
Speaking from personal experience, I have been waiting for my life to one day get less busy since, oh, 2006. But then I started working, then I started working more, and then, more. I started having more ideas, I started taking on more projects, and OH YEAH, I had three kids. Long story short, I think that I’ve effectively given up on the fantasy of anything ever “calming down.” I have been delusional to expect it to.
The sane advice here is to make increasingly more time for writing despite the busy-ness we all feel. But this can translate into fight, flight, or freeze, because we will then start putting pressure on ourselves to write. If we’re always busy, and we carve out time for writing, it can feel like we need to make the most of our writing time, or we’ve “wasted” it or “should’ve been more productive” doing other stuff. Unfortunately, creativity isn’t generally something we can “growth hack” and optimize and all of these other words that are sneakily aimed at making us feel like we’re not doing enough.
From where I’m sitting, I think it’s a balance between doing as much writing as we can, keeping boundaries around our busy-ness so that it doesn’t overtake all of our energy and focus, and also taking some unstructured time to decompress. I find that when I’m most busy, I shut down and NEED to doom scroll. It’s a “do not pass go” situation. I’m not able to do anything productive without being able to zone out or blow off some steam. Putting more pressure on myself is not going to get a better result. In fact, things go off the rails when I feel overwhelmed and then push harder.
I’m starting to throw my time-specific or age-specific goals out the window in this season of my life. I wrote today? Amazing. That’s good for me. Obviously, when we’re under contract and have deadlines, we can’t be totally loosey-goosey, but the longer I live, the more I find that concrete goals (writing session duration or frequency, word count, “sell my book by X birthday”) are detrimental. They allow the fear of failure, the impostor syndrome (great video debunking that here: Imposter Syndrome Is A Scheme: Reshma Saujani’s Smith College Commencement Address), the FOMO, the fear of success (real and insidious), and all of these other buzzwords seep in.
When we are our busiest, our defenses for all this nonsense are lower, and so is our creative energy. Maybe it’s time to weed out some commitments or say “no” more often. I know this isn’t a revolutionary idea, but I refuse to feel bad that I don’t volunteer at my kids’ school that often. I keep getting the emails, and every other parent in my middle son’s classroom has signed up for at least one event. (There is one other holdout, so I don’t feel as bad!) Oh well. I’m a better parent (for them) and person (for me) when I’m not running myself into the ground with over-commitments.
Almost there! One last lesson.
Busy-nessAnalysis paralysis
Don’t miss our final lesson on analysis paralysis!
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