Here’s to Getting Unstuck

Rob Kelley here, following Vaughn’s and Gabi’s posts this week and thinking about getting unstuck. I was stuck for the last several days on a book that continues to fight me. But I have a strategy, or at least a realization, that seems to reflect my writing reality more than my writing fantasy.

I’ve written before on the disconnect I have with how I thought this whole writing journey would all go and how it’s actually going. It’s not better, or worse, just different. In On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King says that he likes to get 2000 words in a day. That’s the classic “butt in chair” advice that often serves me well. Except on the days it doesn’t.

My partner, Margot Anne Kelley, writes both her nonfiction and (forthcoming!) fiction extremely deliberately. After months and months of research, she pours out words in a steady stream, not fast, but sure. That is so not me.

After a day in which I stare at the screen, or write then delete sentence after sentence, or just freak out and refuse to sit at the computer at all because my head is about to explode, Margot gently reminds me that I do not write like she does or like Stephen King does (though, wouldn’t that be nice?).

I’ve come to think of the way I write as “burst mode.” I have a GoPro camera that I take along when we go on adventuresome travel. It’s hard while snorkeling to line up the perfect shot of a colorful fish below you, so I use the camera’s burst mode feature. It fires off a succession of multiple exposures. So, nothing, then a lot. That also seems to be the way I’ve come to write.

I never go very long without a productive day. Sometimes a few days, sometimes a couple of weeks, before my writing anxiety is overwhelmed by my not-writing anxiety and things start to move.

Today I’m thinking about this because I’ve just been in several days of not writing. Events in the world and things in my own life have been distracting me, and I’m trying to gather up some of that grace that Margot shares with me, and give myself a break.

I’ve dreamed of writing and publishing a novel most of my life, since I was a kid sitting on my bed reading science fiction. Then life kind of got in the way and the creative energy needed to write a book got poured into building a company. But once I’d moved on to other things and my brain opened up some bandwidth for writing, I was raring to go.

But, like many writers, my writer’s self-image was this crazily outsized, overblown, fantastically inaccurate portrayal of what I’d experience. We all have read countless books on writing by writers we respect, looking for tips on how to make it all work better. Some work, some don’t.

The tip that matters for me today? Giving myself the grace to know that the focus will return, the words will come, the broken plotline will get fixed, the problematic character  will be resolved.

In other words, today I am writing (and not just a blog entry!).

What works for you when you’re stuck?