Flat Spots

What do you do when a writing "Flat Spot" deepens into a trough of unproductive days, and then begins to stretch into an arid plain of empty pages?  Why does it happen in the first place?

There is plenty of advice about the importance and value of "turning up" and of keeping to a routine as ways to ensure writing success.  Daily life, though, can throw up legitimate obstacles to the writing life - first one, then another, so that flat spot happens, and pages remain blank.  A prior commitment here, or an illness there, and two or three non-writing days have stretched to a week.

There is a point during that week where guilt begins to nibble at the edge of the mind - promises made to one's self have been left unfulfilled - and even though each distracted day was so for a valid reason, that guilt goes from a mound that trips the writer up, to a mountain that looks too high to even attempt to climb.

Standing on the edge of that plain of empty pages, the mountain of guilt and self-accusations looming ahead, is a lonely place to be, it seems - but it is far from a unique position to be in.  There have been plenty of words written on that very topic, such as this blog post by Emily Temple, in which she examines the diary entries of famous writers who were published before their flat spots, and after, but had moments where all seemed lost.

What to do about it?  This article in The New Yorker, by Ferris Jabr, is a nice summary of the value of such a simple solution as going for a walk, while this blog post by Nicole L'autore explores other ways to regain your writing momentum.  Some of Nicole's suggestions do fit on the list of things I do to procrastinate, but others definitely seem worth a try.

In this case, it seems that writing about the reasons I have not been writing was enough to get the words flowing again - and that reminds me of the concept of morning words (another thing I have been less than scrupulous about, lately).  Julia Cameron, in The Artist's Way, seems to be the source for this idea, and she made the point that it really didn't matter what the words were, as long as they were allowed to flow from brain to pen to paper.  Those words might be, at their start, a litany of complaints or excuses, but once they are on the paper, there is room in the brain for the other words to come to the fore - and doesn't that feel better?