This is not writers’s block. This is process.

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This is not writers’s block. This is process.

Cat peer out through a hole in a blue desk

Photo by Eugenia Pankiv on UnsplashOn Creative Shifts

Every time I move into a new creative shift where I have breakthrough—usually a change in voice or tone or storytelling approach—I always have a period of inactivity sometimes six months to eight months where I don’t write in this new way but feel a sort of bubbling up of excitement, anticipation, and all I can do it wait.

While the shift is occurring—it is like bread baking—I can’t do anything to make it go slower or faster. All I can do is pay attention to what is around me (especially writing that draws me in) and to this internal tug, poking me, reminding me that it’s there and that I just have to be patient.

This is not writers’s block. This is process, and the two are very different things for me. I can and do write other things during this period—I’m just not writing THE THING that is going to be the big creative shift. Writer’s block feels hopeless and more external and focused on how the work will be perceived. The creative shift feels more internal, but unlike writer’s block, it is also comforting, exciting, and intense.

This has happened to me about five times in my writing life, so I am now used to recognizing the signs and the feeling.

Today I had the creative breakthrough that will likely see me through the next couple of years of writing.

It came in a flash—all at once. No digging, no looking for it. Just handed to me like a little present. There you go—what you’ve been waiting for. It’s the kind of thing that’s not going to be particularly exciting to anyone else. But when it happens to me, I think it is one of the best creative feelings in the world—the literary equivalent of climbing in to a bed of freshly laundered sheets.

Anyway, things are low right now in the world, in my personal life, so I’m very very happy for this creative boost today.

Writing is weird.

Writers, artists, have you experienced anything like this in your creative lives?

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