My writing inspiration lives through cycles

Alex is hosting this month’s IndieWeb Carnival with a theme of cycles and fluctuations:

There’s one more cycle I need to talk about today: the monthly IndieWeb Carnival cycle. Because here we are: it’s my turn to host! Let’s talk about cycles and fluctuations and give our world just a little more grace.

I’m currently in a really tough creative rut when it comes to writing. For the past couple of months, I’ve been struggling to work on any of the writing projects I want to work on. I have ideas and I’ve worked on those ideas to make it easier to start. Then I sit down and start writing and I barely manage to write a paragraph and I hate even that lone paragraph.

My writing inspiration fluctuates a lot: sometimes I can write for days and sometimes even getting through a short note makes me agonise about everything. Back in my university days, whenever I sat down to work on my bachelor’s thesis (which I never finished), I felt the same despair. It felt like writing a single paragraph took everything out of me and still the end result wasn’t satisfactory.

Over the years, thanks to writing in this blog and participating in writing festivals like Blaugust has really helped me transition from inspiration-driven writing to sit-down-and-just-write type of workflow. I’ve gotten quite good at it and it’s been a massive factor in the fact that I rather casually publish way over 100 pieces a year (for the second year in a row!) without sacrificing the quality.

I have a couple of bigger writing projects that I’ve been trying to get started this fall but so far I have less than 1000 words on each and I don’t know if it’s due to a lack of direction and clarity or due to my struggles with writing in general right now.

Despite years of ups and downs, forward movement and time standing still, I still haven’t quite figured out how to get out of the rut. I don’t know if time will fix it on its own or if I need to do something to get my creative juices flowing and rekindle the joy of writing.

Sometimes the smart thing to do is to take a break. Doing something completely different usually helps get tangled mind untangled, to get some distance between yourself and the problem and to see things from new perspectives. But it’s hard to do when I still want to write. And I’ve gotten quite attached to my weekly blogging streak — which probably is the sign that it needs to break because streaks can become obsessions and obsessions are rarely good for you.

On the other hand, Rachael Cayley has written about writer’s block in a way that resonates with me a lot:

When we diagnose ourselves as having writer’s block, we can start to believe that we aren’t currently able to write. If you find yourself with a sore leg, it may well be that avoiding walking is a sound strategy. If you find yourself unable to write, might it be a sound strategy to avoid writing? The answer to that question is almost always no. Not writing has little-to-no curative power, in my experience.

I find that maintaining a rhythm of writing and a forward-moving momentum is what helps me write more. Writing inspires writing. Except when everything I manage to write makes me cringe and wonder how I’ve ever been able to write beautiful sentences and wonderful paragraphs.

One thing’s for sure: I can’t wait to move on from this part of the cycle, back into the bliss of writing where words come to life and take control of themselves and my fingers on a keyboard or grabbing a pen are just a vehicle for the words to appear and join each other for a dance.