You know, it’s occurred to me that for all my many, many foibles and dumb struggles as a writer, one problem I’ve mostly avoided is the proverbial ‘crying at an empty page’ thing I see cited on here a lot.
Like, I vibe with the general ‘want to write, can’t’ feeling those posts go for, that’s the writing mood, but that specific trapped in a staredown with a white field feeling, I do not.
Partly of course that’s because when I’m pushing myself to write when I don’t feel like it, I usually aim at extending a WIP, which often provides a launching point. And when it doesn’t, my failure to write manifests as editing what’s already there, which is less soul-wracking than spending the same time trying and failing to generate fresh content and winding up with nothing at all.
But also, and here’s the part I think may be useful, I find it helps to get a hundred words or so--a section of description, or a dialogue is particularly good because you only have to hold the exact wording of what’s said, and the tone and blocking will be carried with in your brain, and you can add the dialogue tags and descriptions on a second pass--lined up in my head before I sit down to write.
You spend a while putting those sentences together mentally, and then sit down and bang them out at speed, and by the time you’ve caught up with yourself odds are good you’ve got the momentum and know what’s next and are off to the races.
Routine household chores are consequently a particularly fruitful writing window, because the physical movement encourages mental activity, and the actions require enough focus to keep me from anxiety-sabotaging myself but not usually enough to tie up my language processors. (And most of them can be dropped temporarily while I scurry off to my computer to do the typing.)
This leads to a lot of getting very annoyed at people wanting my attention while I’m mopping floors lol. 😂 If you live with people who won’t fuck off this can become a problem.
Anyway this is how Emily Dickinson supposedly wrote most of her poetry, minus the typing, so I call it the Dickinson method. A lot of people’s brains probably don’t datasort enough like mine (or hers ig?) for this to work out for them, but I thought I’d throw it out there as a suggest for any fellow writers who find themselves caught in a can’t-get-started spiral a lot.
One of the great things about writing, after all, amongst the arts, is that you can do short bursts of it silently with no physical tools whatsoever.
