Finding your flow as a writer

What do you do when your creative flow feels blocked, your energy levels are low, or you simply don’t feel you have anything to say?

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I studied with a famous poet when I was in college. I took two poetry workshops with her, and it’s safe to say that her approach to critical reading and revising made me a much better writer. It also made me into an editor, and that led to a long career in journalism. Although I was writing and editing prose about tech, I used skills I had developed in those poetry workshops every day: Close reading, attention to nuance, an ear for rhythm and flow, a sense of structure and drama, an ability to hear what’s left unsaid or what could be said better. 

But for about ten years after college, I wrote no poetry at all. She was such a sharp critic, and her voice was so powerful and distinctive, that I could not write a single line without hearing her comment on it. Fairly or not, I imagined her voice as a disparaging one, and it discouraged me from continuing to write my own work. Without explicit assignments, I simply couldn’t get started. 

My way back into writing for myself (poetry and otherwise) started with haiku. I found the form was spare enough, and modest enough, that it could slip past my internal poetry sentries. 

Haiku are extremely short, and the form eschews most of the tools used by modern poets: Metaphor, overt allusion, excessively self-conscious wordplay, direct descriptions of emotions. It is a self-effacing form, Zen in its origins and aspirations. I found I could write haiku about the plum petals in my daughter’s hair, an orange-brown leaf twirling down next to a Calder sculpture, a flock of crows crossing the space between skyscrapers, or the moon rising over a neighbor’s house. I might not have been writing great poetry, but these little moments satisfied my need to connect with the world and to express myself. Then I found that the words on the page set up a kind of resonance that started to shake loose the rust and get the poetic wheels turning again. 

That gave me enough of a charge to keep going. I discovered the haibun (a form mixing prose and haiku) and from there started experimenting again with longer poems and essays. 

Along the way I learned about freewriting, from authors like Julia Cameron and Peter Elbow. And through experimentation I learned some techniques that could help me to get words on the page before my internal censor could stop them. 

These techniques are as useful for getting un-stuck when writing prose (journalism or commercial copywriting) as they are for poetry.

I’m sharing a few of these here as they might help you, too:

• Writing with the screen off. 
• Writing using the “Dingbats” font. 
• Scribbling pages in a cheap-ass composition book instead of a fancy Moleskine or Leuchtturm so I’m less inclined to take the writing “seriously” and freer to be sloppy, messy, and imperfect. 
• Writing the opposite of what I want to say. 
• Writing something that would really never fly.
• Writing deliberately badly. 
• Messing up the first page and crossing things out right away to get it over with.
• Dictating my thoughts and letting the phone or the computer transcribe it.

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Even without blockages, the flow comes and goes. For the past few months, since the start of the winter season in November, my energy levels have been low. This year, possibly for the first time in my entire life, I recognized this as a normal, seasonal ebb, and gave myself permission to rest.

But by mid January, I was ready for the rest to be over. I thought I had recovered and was ready to zoom back into action, writing and editing for myself and for clients. But it was still tough going. I was not blocked. I just didn’t have the energy to write. The tank was empty.

Eventually I recognized that I needed to reckon with it. Meditation, yoga, ayurvedic diet tweaks, Reiki, garden work, swimming, and therapy: I’m throwing everything I have at this. (Some of them are even helping!)

And I’m still trying to make enough time to rest. (Thanks for nothing, Daylight Saving Time.)

I’m taking some encouragement from the Daodejing (aka the Tao Te Ching). Translators struggle with the text because so many of its core terms have no correspondence to anything in most Western cultures.

Dao, for instance, is often translated as “The Way,” but this word also functions as a verb (“to make a way” or “way-making”), and its earliest use in Chinese literature has to do with making ways for water to flow: Channeling it and helping it to course one way or another. 

That leads directly to another Daoist word, wuwei, which translators often render as “non-action” but is more like “non-coercive action.” The most effective way to control water is to recognize its tendencies and work with them, rather than against them. Build small dams and channels to help it flow, rather than one big dam that stops it up and creates a giant reservoir. Of course, you can build a big dam if you want to. Daoism doesn’t say that’s wrong, exactly, but it does recognize that this creates additional problems, often overlooked by the builders: Inundation of beautiful places, disruptions of ecosystems, silting up of the bottom, and eventually the risk of catastrophic dam failures. 

In the long run, everything is a tradeoff. What gets blocked here will flood somewhere else, or perhaps at another time. 

The Daoist approach recognizes that it’s easier to understand how the water is flowing, then use the flow to your advantage so that your aims are accomplished without any apparent effort. It may not even seem that you are doing anything. In fact, you are doing something, but it’s more subtle, because you are working with the forces of the universe instead of at cross purposes to them. Wuwei.

In other words: When your energy is at an ebb, don’t try to fight it forcefully. Look for the place and time where you can make a small adjustment with a big impact. 

Perhaps that means resting now, marshaling your resources, and preparing for a strong push in the spring. For me, it means investigating ways to recharge.

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Feeling stuck in writing is a sign of insufficient energy. Either something is stopping it up or it’s not being generated in the first place. Either way, it’s not flowing. 

Once you recognize the problem, it’s easier to see what you need to do to help get things flowing again.

Things that can block writing energy:

• Excessively active internal editor. Nothing feels good enough or original enough. Everything you write seems dumb and trite.
• Internalized critical self-image. You’ve been told that you have no talent, or you internalized that message somewhere along the way. You don’t think you’re really a writer — you’re just an imposter. It’ll never work because you lack talent.
• Stress. Other things in your life, or your world, are preoccupying you. Stress diverts you from writing because you can’t stop worrying about your job, partner, kids, politics, the economy, geopolitics, the environment …

Things that can deprive writing energy of the fuel it needs:

• Lack of stimulation. Needing fresh input, variety, new experiences, new ideas, people, relationships.
• Lack of audience. Someone to read, respond, or even just to imagine reading what you’ve written.
• Inadequate rest. Simply needing more sleep, or time to recover, so that you feel rested enough. Creativity takes energy, and that requires rest. 
• Time. Writing takes time. If you don’t have some hours each week devoted to the practice, it won’t happen.
• Space. A room of one’s own. Some kind of place to write in where you won’t be disturbed.

What do you do when your creative flow feels blocked or low? Please post a comment here and let me know what works for you.