As I write, I’ve just completed a Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching Creative Writing.
I used to be an English teacher and I know how to teach creative writing, but in this course, I focused on my work as a writing mentor. The last few years have seen me develop workshops for beginning writers who wish to write a book. So, I’ve been working on creating a new course while researching the pedagogy that informs it. It was a lot of fun, but the writing is very different. Teaching and studying, while inspiring me, have seen me put my other writing on hold.
I feel like I’m beginning again after a long break. Starting over is hard. But not starting is even harder. I’ve been procrastinating and even procrasti-writing (the writing you do for anything but the project you should be working on) In the procrastination, I’ve found myself becoming less in tune with my writing brain. I find it harder to get to my desk and just write. I’ve started to lose that first love of writing that would see me sit at my desk and not move for eight hours.
I miss writing, but at the same time, find it the hardest thing to reconnect with.
How do you recover that sense of possibility? Intention, goal-setting and even planning are all essential, but unless we believe in possibility it will come to naught.
Recovering a sense of possibility is not what I thought it was going to be about. It’s a spiritual thing and requires more faith than I realised.
We unconsciously set a limit on how much God can give us or help us. We are stingy with ourselves.
And if we receive a gift beyond our imagining, we often send it back.
Julia Cameron
I’ve taken a few steps to help me to be accountable to the call to writing. I signed up for a writing intensive in October. My aim is to have a first draft of a manuscript to take with me.
Finding a critique partner to be accountable to is another step. I used to have these and it worked so well, but I let it go. So, from July every two weeks, my partner and I will share chapters.
The main thing is to sit in my chair and write. Even if it’s rough and raw, I’m sitting at my desk with my notebook and pen (I’m old-school in that regard!) and I’m writing that rough first draft.
I have writer friends and we pray for each other. We pray when life gets hard, when life brings joy, and when life brings us a sense of world-weariness.
Faith is the ingredient that covers it all. Faith in a God who has gifted us and calls us to a higher purpose. Faith in a God who knows the words that burn in our hearts that are destined for others. If we don’t write those words, who will?
I teach about a sense of possiblity in my workshops and seek to inspire it in others. Today, it’s time to recover it in myself. How about you?
I don’t have any advice to share (at least I haven’t thought of any yet!), but I wanted to agree. Writer’s block can often be spiritual for me. I’ll keep trying to plough on, and it can take a few weeks before I realize there must be something God is trying to tell me and I’m just not getting it. That’s why nothing is working, because my writing is part of my relationship with Him. So, it can take me a bit, but I do stop and ask Him what I’ve missed. Once I figure it out and deal with it, the writer’s block just goes away.
Now, if only it didn’t take me so long to stop and say, “Okay, God. What am I missing?”
The other reason I can have writer’s block is fear. When I let my insecurities have the reins nothing goes right. But when I trust God, things are good again.
It’s amazing how slow we are to ask God sometimes isn’t it? Trusting God in everything is the key. Thank you for sharing. 😊
I wrestled with this for so long. Health issues didn’t help, nor did paid work. However at the beginning of the year another author asked if I would like to do writing sprints with her on Wednesday mornings, then I set up a group with others on Friday. I suddenly found myself finishing my novel. An appointment for writing (an editing) made all the difference 🥰.