Beyond Shitty First Drafts

Lit Salon on severe writer's block, dead muses, and dried up inspiration + 3 researched methods to get writing and keep yourself writing (including a very freeing exercise)

orig. published July 2023

Lit Salon

Dear Dried Up: Join Me in Perpetual Chasing & Holy Gratitude

Dear Jeannine,

I’m afraid my muse has died. About five months ago, I quit my job in order to pursue writing full time. I was working in healthcare—I’m a nursing assistant—while trying to build some kind of a writing life. Before the pandemic, it was working. Not only did I publish several poems and short stories, but I have a half-finished novel in the works as well. Then came the pandemic, and everything changed. It’s hard for me to describe how stressful my work became and remained. I had nothing left to give to my writing. And I’m lucky enough that, with my partner’s income, we can afford for me not to work, at least for a while. So, late last winter, my partner and I agreed I could take a year to invest in my writing life. It’s hard to describe how ecstatic I was while anticipating a year of dedicated writing time. I don’t know if anything could have made me happier than the idea of spending all day every day immersed in the craft, producing new work, improving existing drafts. A dream, I thought.

As it turns out, maybe I was right: that kind of life is a dream. My year off is almost half over, and I’ve barely produced anything at all. Every morning, my partner leaves for work and I sit down with my laptop and try, but it’s as if the muse has abandoned me entirely. I used to feel excited to write. Now, I feel dried up. To make matters worse, my lack of productivity is making me anxious. I don’t want to tell my partner how little I’ve produced. I also don’t want to open my laptop in the morning. I get a rush of dread just thinking about that awful, dead feeling of sitting there, blocked, no inspiration anywhere. It’s breaking my heart. It’s possible that if I were actually doing something meaningful with my time, I could keep writing and postpone returning to my healthcare job. But if this dry spell continues, I just don’t think I could justify that to my partner, or even to myself.

Why is this happening? I have a hunch it’s not a coincidence that my inspiration dried up when I quit my job, but why?

Signed,
All Dried Up

Dear Dried Up,

First, thank you for your service in healthcare during the scariest time of our lives. I am so grateful. Second, I cannot tell you how much I love this question. Mostly because it’s a question I feel I have an actual answer to, an answer that might even help you salvage what is left of your year off. That’s because I don’t really believe in inspiration—or at least, I don’t believe in waiting for it. Instead, I believe in courting it, befriending it, and, most of all, seizing it. Here’s how I do that using a trifold method that has not only worked for me throughout my writing life, but has also worked for many, many other writers I coach. It’s simple, but effective, and involves three evidence-based tenets that not only work to dissolve paralysis, but also help boost productivity, creativity, and literary inventiveness for anyone.

First, you it might help you to let go of any concept of “the muse” and imagine instead that you are actually clocked into a job just like any other. As Cheryl Strayed famously said, “Writing is hard....Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” And Leonard Cohen, when asked about inspiration, said, “If I knew where inspiration came from, I would go there more often.”

The point is, if you’ve decided your writing day begins when your partner leaves for work, then the best thing to do is to begin writing at that time, whether or not you feel inspired, and even if what you produce isn’t. very good.

The way I get myself to write when conditions are unfavorable (i.e., I feel dried up) is to set a timer and use the Pomodoro Technique, which you can read about here. But don’t get bogged down by the details of the technique. Basically, all you need to do is set a timer for 25 minutes and write that entire time before you take a break. Then take a break and come back and do it again. Etc. Until your designated writing time is finished.

Since you read WITD, you probably already know I love timers. Why? Because they work for everything from getting a toddler to come inside from the yard for bath to getting myself to produce writing. John Cleese has written about the potency of using limited time periods as a creative catalyst, saying:

“It’s not enough to create space; you have to create your space for a specific period of time.”

Second, see if you can identify a combination of shorter- and longer-term goals, even if you’re in the middle of a book project now (e.g., finish this story, revise that poem, complete the novel manuscript) and set deadlines for yourself to complete those goals. For most of us, a whole year is too much time to work toward something. We do better when we break it into smaller chunks. And some of us need that good, satisfying feeling of finishing some shorter works during the process of book projects so that we can feel the joy of completion and publication.

And the deadlines in and of themselves are magical. Deadlines work by making us operate within a set time limit, just as Cleese describes in the link above. It’s psychological. I feel fortunate to have written to deadlines since the beginning of my writing career thanks to magazines, newspapers, contract books, and other firmly deadlined assignments. And, because I am a stereotypically messy creative type, I am pretty sure I’d never have established a successful writing career without having started out by writing to deadlines and, in that way, teaching myself their power and importance so that I could continue imposing them on myself even when they slipped away later.

Again, you might wonder why the deadline of your year of time away from work looming does not seem to be working. That’s probably because it has felt too long-term, too big, and too vague—and now that it’s drawing nearer, it probably feels too ominous). To work well, deadlines must be specific and, ideally, shorter term (for the novel, you would need achievable milestones such as “finish 10 more pages” or “revise chapter 7”). So, identify several concrete, specific goals (at least three, not more than six) and then get out your calendar and set some achievable deadlines over the next few months. Be clear and specific and realistic.

To enhance the power of the deadlines you set for yourself, you might also look up submission windows for some of your dream journals and/or identify agents you’d love to represent your novel and/or independent presses you’d be thrilled to publish with, etc. Identify when these journals, agents, and publishers open and close for submissions. Also check contests (Poets & Writers is a good place for that).

Third, and this one might feel strange, but I highly encourage you to give yourself permission to write really badly. There’s nothing more intimidating and paralyzing than the pressure of being so generously granted the time to write and feeling you must produce brilliance in exchange for that gift. It just does not work that way. You have to be able to produce absolute rubbish in order to get anything onto the page.

But this is not just another way of saying, as Anne Lamott brilliantly advised us, that “shitty first drafts” are part of the deal. This is even deeper. This is about shaking off the need to “write pretty” at all, and actually strive in another direction. I want you instead to identify every fear you have around bad writing, and lean into it for a while. Just write as badly as you possibly can.

I call this reaching after “the glory of imperfection,” and I have an exercise for it, as follows, which I have seen work wonders for many, many writers who are stuck in place for one reason or another: