February | 2018 | Eye-Dancers

We’ve all been there. You’re working on something–a story, perhaps, or a song, a poem. A painting. Something creative, something you believe in and aim to finish. You’ve managed to juggle your schedule today, delegate chores and to-dos, plan ahead. It’s the first time all week you have a chance to dig in and proceed with your masterpiece. You have a glass of water or tea at the ready, maybe even a snack. You plan on being here for a while.

“Let’s go,” you say, psyching yourself up. “Let’s get this party started.”

And then . . . nothing happens.

The words don’t come. The characters don’t cooperate. The brushstrokes feel heavy and blunt, messy, as if you’re trying to paint underwater. The image you’re creating, the story you’re weaving, the art you’re making is stuck, dead on the page. Your tea gets cold, the snacks sit there, uneaten. And your cursor blinks at you, in and out, in and out, like a silent, mocking accusation.

But you aren’t ready to admit defeat. You’re not sure when the next block of hours will present itself. You’ve arranged your entire day around this! Why are the words playing hard to get?

Certainly, I have experienced this phenomenon more times than I care to remember. While writing The Singularity Wheel, there were days when it felt as though my head was in a blender, the words and phrases and paragraphs jumbled into a miasma of incoherence. And since time was at a premium, and I was already so far behind my publication schedule for the book, I would resist, push back against the reluctant and ever-capricious muse.

The odd thing was–I might be struggling like this after a successful literary sojourn the last time I sat down to write. In The Singularity Wheel, for example, Chapter 10 went smoothly–I sat down and wrote that chapter in two hours flat, and it required only minimal revisions. But Chapter 11 was a brier patch, a wasteland of pitfalls and quicksand and hidden, poisonous vipers lying in wait to strike. The first run-through took multiple sessions, and even then, the chapter later went through various revisions. I even started thinking of it as “the nightmare chapter,” or, when I was feeling especially dramatic, “the chapter where my novel goes to die.”

Out of frustration, when I encounter a rupture in the creative process, a session where I just can’t produce, I too often try to force it. I’ll write a sentence, then another, and another, and after several minutes, they may bleed to two or three paragraphs. It is like attempting to find water in an abandoned and dry well. Every word is an effort, every sentence a marathon. What’s worse, nothing sounds right. After a half hour or an hour of this, I will pause and read what I’ve got. Almost without fail, what I’ve got is junk.

But the streak of stubbornness dies hard. During one particularly unproductive session, I pulled my chair away from the desk, stood up, did a dozen push-ups, two dozen sit-ups, jogged in place, took a walk around the house, upstairs, downstairs, in the basement, and then back again. I just need to get the old juices flowing, I told myself. Work out the kinks. When I returned to the manuscript, however, the kinks were still there, binding me with their inflexible, industrial-strength straps.

It’s times like this when I truly appreciate the flip side–those sessions when the words flow like lava, pouring out, my fingers barely able to keep up with my thoughts, swept away in a creative tsunami. It is a high like no other. But it cannot be forced. It comes when it comes, as mercurial as the weather in the hill country of central Vermont.

Ultimately, this is a truth we have to accept. Even the best-laid plans of writers and artists must sometimes be altered to fit the mood of the muse. We fight against a barren spell. We might rant and rave and swear, and try to will the words to come. But that rarely works–at least not for me.

Once I know I’ve given it all I have, once I’ve stared at the screen long enough with no results to show for my efforts, however well intentioned; once I’ve taken a long walk along the country road where I live and still cannot produce even a single decent sentence, I grudgingly acknowledge the truth. Today just isn’t my day.

Temporarily defeated (but only temporarily, I remind myself!), I endeavor to get away from the work and the frustration and perhaps watch a favorite movie or TV show. Who knows? If I’m lucky, something in whatever I decide to watch may serve as an artistic catalyst of sorts and get me out of my funk.