The vision I have presented in recent posts about the trouble of writing is a fundamentally positive one. This is a fertile space if we relate to it in an open and confident way. It is only by attuning ourselves to the feelings we encounter in it, the sense of an incipient idea even when we remain unable to fully identify it, that we can move through it. The joy of writing comes when we have something to say, while avoiding the temptation to fixate on outputs and/or squeeze too much out of the inspiration we experience at a particular moment.
The problem comes when we find ourselves stuck in that creative darkness, either at a particular moment or in a sustained way. My experience of the former has been that simply accepting nothing is coming, going off to do something as far away from writing as the practicalities of the day permit, can be the best antidote to that stuckness becoming a chronic matter. The only time I’ve ever found myself chronically stuck was during a period of immense personal upheaval where I simply couldn’t write for months. There was so much that I was struggling to process personally that the subterranean work described by Bertrand Russell had simply ceased for the foreseeable future. I tried to sit down and write but it only intensified my distress about everything that was going on in my life. Eventually I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to write in any meaningful sense, so dropped the expectation that I would and instead focused on getting myself through a difficult situation with as much care and self-concern as I could muster under the circumstances.
This experience of chronic stuckness was in this sense not unlike my experience of situational stuckness. I just had to give up writing for the season rather than the day. It was striking that when I resolved the situation, eventually taking the action that freed me from a state of interpersonal limbo, I immediately regained the impulse to write. It felt as if a tap had suddenly turned back on in my mind, leading me to write thousands of words over the next few days with an intensity that had eluded me for months, if not years. In fact it was a source of immense comfort over the subsequent months as I negotiated the fallout of my decision. It left me with a vivid appreciation of how writing can be a refuge, a reliable place of meaning and security which you can cultivate and return to.
It was newly clear how intricately the enjoyment of writing, the experience of flow and the feelings associated with it, came to be tangled up in my broader experience of the world. Not in the sense of enjoying writing when life was good and struggling with it when life was bad. It went much deeper than that, suggesting to me the flow of writing (or its absence) was tied to a mode of engagement with the world. Even if the circumstances were immensely challenging, they would still be conducive to writing if I approached them from a position of agency. That’s what freed me from being stuck in creative darkness: a decision about my future I made myself rather than waiting for someone else to make it for me. My experience is that if I approach life in this way, I will have something to say. It might not be insightful, interesting or creative. But to the extent I am genuinely engaging with my circumstances, I will have something to say.
The reason I’m sharing this is not to position my own writing practice as typical or even interesting. It’s to illustrate what reflection on the writing process can look like, if you see your practice as located within the psychic and social conditions of your life more widely. My suggestion is there’s a practical value in cultivating this reflection in order to better understand the psychological drivers of your writing. What need is it serving? What are you trying to prove? When do you experience it as working? When have you found it a punishing ordeal?
If you approach your writing as a narrowly technical exercise in which you either produce a certain outcome (or fail to) then you’re unlikely to consider this deeper layer of motivation. If you don’t understand these deeper forces driving your writing, an understanding that will remain partial and fallible by its nature, you will experience your enjoyment of writing as a mystery over which you can exercise little influence. It will be a creative flow you sometimes gratefully receive and which at other times evades you but which you fundamentally exercise little to no influence over.
I’m suggesting that in contrast it’s possible to develop a reflective orientation to your writing which can support your efforts to nourish the conditions in which ideas will consistently flow and you’ll regularly have something to say. I’ve drawn on my experience throughout to illustrate what that looks like in my own writing practice, which continues to develop and evolve as I do. The point is not that you should replicate what I’m doing, though I hope some of what I’ve shared will be useful as tips and techniques to experiment with. The reason I’ve offered this account is instead to support you in developing your own reflective approach to writing in order to better understand the relationship between your life circumstances, your psychological state, and your creative output.
Mark Carrigan 