Getting (Re)Started: Mostly Practical Pieces of Advice
It’s amazing to me how hard it is to come back to some things. Even the things we enjoy, or love. Even the things we suspect we might be good at or that we’ve put a lot of time into.
As I’ve discussed previously, I’ve been feeling unwell for some time now. In November I took time off for an unexpected surgery and my healing wasn’t as smooth or as quick as promised. The stress of it and the mental and emotional fog of my illness took me away from the creative practice I had been cultivating. It also has meant not running and not going to the gym in all these weeks.
It would stand to reason that taking a break and coming back would be simple. Like picking up a book from the marked spot, or seeing an old friend after time apart. That I would be able to start where I left off. Reason would tell me that coming back to a creative practice I have fought hard for and spent much time with would be easy, but it is not.
Reason though, is not the guiding force in our lives and it falls apart here. It is more like coming back to running, which will ache and wind me as if I had never done it to begin with. But it is also worse than running, because not being able to run does not fill me with the existential dread of never being able to run again.
Like Louise Gluck saying in a Poets & Writers’ interview, “… you don’t know in those periods that the silence will end, that you will recover speech. … When I’m not writing, all the old work becomes a reprimand: Look what you could do once, you pathetic slug.”
To start again is to start for the first time, each time. Uncertain that you can do it.
But hard is not impossible. Difficult is not insurmountable. Louise Gluck was never quite sure she’d write another poem, but she did always seem to write another one, right up until we lost her a few years ago.
We experience time linearly and we’ve come to expect that our projects, our process, our lives behave this way. Linearity is our limited perception and experience of a vast and complicated universe. It may be all we have to understand our lives, but it’s not reality.
In reality, we stop and we start. We circle back. We dance around the same spots and wait for something to happen.
Here are some of the things that I have done to help myself get started… again. Maybe you’ll need them some day too.
credit where credit is due
Start with what you’re doing well. List your accomplishments from the previous day, week, month, and year. Identify places where you have grown, persevered, or developed. Let yourself notice what you are doing well.
Too often goal setting starts from a negative place. The way we frame our goals or ambitions often relies on identifying what we feel we didn’t do well or well enough. I think striving for more is great, but it should come from a place of abundance, not lack.
Maybe you managed to meet your word count or time spent goals twice last week. That’s incredible! Maybe the day before you wrote down a bit of dialogue you overheard. Maybe you’ve found in re-reading work from this past year that you managed to craft resonant images or present clear arguments.
There is no accomplishment or feat too small for this exercise. You get credit even when what you did didn’t live up to what you might have wanted or expected from yourself. Any amount of time, any amount of thought, that went into your creative practice or into yourself was time you wrested away from the hundreds and thousands of things that demanded your attention.
Even if all you did was think about your practice, even if all you did was want to be creative, that is a huge accomplishment! There are not any rewards for being creative, for wanting to strive in the process of creation, to return to the slow pace of making in a fast world.
To want to make something uniquely and uniquely your own in a world saturated with easy access is an accomplishment worth celebrating.
break your box
If you’re struggling with your creative practice, maybe try someone else’s.
If you’re a novelist with a block, try writing non-fiction or a poem! If you’re a poet who can’t feel the rhythm, try writing a short story! If you’re stuck on any project, just try writing something else. That doesn’t have to mean abandoning the work in progress, but letting yourself take a break to recalibrate.
Here are some starter ideas for your un-scheduled writing in a different genre. These ideas can be applied to any genre.
- A fact: On Venus it rains diamonds.
- Write about the best (or worst) meal you’ve ever eaten.
- Think about some firsts in your life— first kiss, first job, first car, first fight with a spouse, etc.
But maybe that’s not enough of a break. Maybe you need to try drawing, painting, dancing, or music making. For me, I find myself turning to thread-crafts like knitting, embroidery, or even darning when writing isn’t working for me. I like that it’s not a blank page, but a tangible object that I can then point to and say “Look, I made this.” Which is why in the winter of 2021 I wrote nothing, but knit two (child-sized) sweaters and some hats.
Allow yourself to be creative in new ways and see what it unleashes.
read poetry
All writers (and other non-writer humans) benefit from reading poetry. Because poets have the uncanny ability to talk about many things at once and to subvert our expectations for language, poetry is an excellent antidote for creative block.
Here are just some suggestions, all available online.
Frank Stanford, In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot
Frank Stanford, What About This
Tracy K. Smith, Garden of Eden
Kaveh Akbar, Gloves
While you read, let yourself drift and linger with whatever associations come up. Don’t focus on “getting” the poem, but rather on feeling the poem or seeing the poem. Give yourself space to sit with the images than came to you. Maybe try writing on them.
If these poems don’t work, try looking for others that spark something in you. Let yourself be carried away with the language like they are made of music.
permission to suck
Most of the time the things that keep us from our writing are our other obligations, things like work, family, eating, sleeping, and the state of the world generally.
But sometimes, the thing that keeps us from writing is nothing but ourselves.
What we write on the page doesn’t match the version in our head. So we don’t write, thinking that we can think it into submission before we get started. We imagine we can avoid all the painful starting and stopping, all the unrealized plot elements, cliched metaphors, and trope-y characters, but the only way to avoid all that bad writing is to never start at all.
Bad writing is, unfortunately, a part of the process, but our fear of writing badly can keep us from starting. You have to give yourself permission to suck at writing to be able to get started. If you don’t want my permission though, here’s Barbara Kingslover’s:
“To begin, give yourself permission to write a bad book. Writer’s block is another name for writer’s dread—the paralyzing fear that our work won’t measure up. It doesn’t matter how many books I’ve published, starting the next one always feels as daunting as the first. A day comes when I just have to make a deal with myself: write something anyway, even if it’s awful. Nobody has to know. Maybe it never leaves this room! Just go. Bang out a draft.”
-Barbara Kingslover
channel nike
When you can’t write, paint, sing, draw, etc, when you feel uninspired, or lost, or otherwise downtrodden, sometimes the only thing thing to do is to just do it anyways. Even poorly, even when you don’t want to, even when you think you don’ t have anything in you to write.
Even and especially when you can only do a little. Doing a little at a time will pry the doors back open and you’ll be flush with ideas and enthusiasm again soon.
If you feel so inclined, send me an email and let me know if any of these tips worked for you.
Happy writing friends,
SJ
