If you attended my presentation during the Writing from the Heart virtual conference on October 21, 2023, you know technical difficulties prevented me from delivering my workshop “Slaying the Dragon.”
I apologize! What follows is what I intended to deliver. I hope it’s of use. And if you’d like to watch the presentation, you can find it on the Story Circle YouTube channel.
First-Aid for Writer’s Block:
You’re writing your heart out because you know you have a story to tell and you’re the only one to tell it. Could be a short story, a novel, a narrative, a memoir, an article, an essay, a letter… and then, suddenly, you stop.
At first, it’s not quite clear you’re in deep trouble. After all, this happens all the time to a writer. Hills and valleys, rushes and pauses, just like always. You’re just taking a breather.
But you slump in your chair.
Then you get out of your chair, your room, your house.
Make another pot of coffee. Let the dog out. Answer the phone.
Maybe read a few e-mails and answer… just one. Or two. That one looks urgent. They all look urgent!
Finally, back to the matter at hand.
You start a sentence, and it suddenly goes off a cliff. You watch it crash and burn.
Or you’re into your first rough draft or your second or third, and suddenly, inexplicably, or perhaps predictably, you’ve just stopped. You get up the next day, determined to rise from the ashes of your own faltering self and begin again.
But… with what?
For the life of you, writer that you are, you cannot figure out how to go forward. You look back and it’s all a mess.
It was never a good idea to begin with.
Despair descends like the proverbial brooding clouds. Your shoulders feel weighted; you find it hard to swallow; your eyes swim with tears. Your heart is thrumming.
Your life is over. Your writing life is over. There will never be another word from you, so why are you just sitting there?
All right, maybe it’s not as dramatic as all that.
Maybe you just don’t show up for your next writing time. There is always something else to do. And then the next time becomes the next and the next and then you can’t imagine you ever lived a writer’s life. You put your head down. You mutter help!
For writers, not writing is like a little death. Nothing feels right.
I’ve been there enough times to know there is a rhythm to this despair. And thus, the expectation you can wait it out and it will pass like a sudden summer storm. Hills and valleys, just like always.
You know all that, but this time you really are stuck. This time it’s all truly falling apart. This time the well is really dry. Not a creative thought in sight.
It feels existential. It is existential.
“Who am I if I’m not writing?”
“The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” ~ Flannery O’Connor, quoting St. Cyril of Jerusalem
The “Father of Souls” is what is in your deepest heart. But it’s dangerous and fraught all along the way, guarded, as it is, by the dragon who would devour you: all those feelings you suspect are true, that say you aren’t good enough, brave enough, or smart enough to write the tale you most need to tell.
How to Heal Your Despairing Writer’s Soul
You start by havening. This is a self-soothing technique that calms the amygdala inside your head and tells you that all is well.
Slide one palm over the other and back again. Shut your eyes. Stroke your arms from shoulder to elbow, then your face. Think of a wonderful thing you wrote.
Then, move. Put on some jazzy music and move your body through the rhythm and beat of it for, oh, maybe five minutes or so. Shake, rattle and roll with it. Release all that trapped energy and make room for a new thing.
Now go from inside, where all those accumulated demons have taken hold, to outside. Focus intensely on what is outside the self by immersing the five senses. It’s really helpful to have a kind of first-aid kit, if you will, so find a nice little box and put these things in it. Or you can just focus on the five senses, one at a time, with things that are at hand. Either way, you want full concentration on the sensations before you.
Here’s what’s inside my writerly first-aid kit:
5 things to hold up to the light:
- Amethyst crystal (protection, intuition, spirituality)
- Citrine crystal (creative process, happiness, light)
- Lepidolite crystal (healing, calming)
- Norwegian glacier stone (eternity)
- White crystal (enlightenment, guidance)
5 things to touch
- 1. Irish worry stone
- Petosky stone
- Shiny blue polished glass. The words: To Life.
- Clear, smooth crystal
- Smooth Pale opaque blue stone. The word: Imagine
5 things to hear (from soft to loud)
- 1. Bells on a string
- Baby wind chimes
- Single bell
- Buddha bells
- Buddha gong
5 things to smell
- 1. Jasmine
- Lavender
- honeysuckle
- Frankincense
- Bookstore candle. Light it. It really does smell like a bookstore. An old, authentic bookstore!
5 things to taste
- 1. Chocolate
- Chocolate
- Chocolate
- Chocolate
- Chocolate
Once you’ve opened to everything the sensory world has to offer, you are calm. You are not so much waiting, as ready. You can feel anticipation down to your fingertips.
They yearn to touch the keys.
Next, embrace the arbitrary. Then make it inevitable.
Get out of your logical, left-brain mind—it needs to be silent right now—and enter the right-brain: the intuitive, spontaneous side of you, and try these five things: You’re just playing around when no one’s looking. You don’t have to keep any of them.
1 Introduce an event that, on the face of it, has little to do with what you are writing. That is, make something improbable and unexpected happen. If you can’t think of anything, look at the props in the setting of the narrative you’re writing, or your life—your room, your house, your office.
Something falls over, crashes, catches fire, slams shut, turns on, rings, pounds. Somebody screams, sighs, whimpers. Laughs. Why are they doing that? No matter, just describe them doing it. The phone rings. My God.
What is the worst, the best it can be? Describe what can’t possibly happen, what shouldn’t happen, what positively won’t happen. Put these in a list. Surprise yourself with the outrageousness of it all.
Ask yourself, but what if it did?
2 Introduce a new, totally unexpected character. Out of your dreams, back from the dead, out of the newspaper’s front pages.
The mail arrives. It’s a letter you are afraid to open. The doorbell rings. Who is it? Somebody dead? A celebrity?
Who is the last person imaginable to walk on the set of the narrative of your life, your story?
Someone you dread? Love? Fear?
They’re already here. At the lawn, now at the door, the living room, the kitchen, yikes! into the bedroom.
It’s your state senator, the mini-mart owner with buck teeth and a neck rash, Elvis Presley, Donald Trump, Oprah with a Sweepstakes check, the dead uncle with breath like stale radishes.
He’s carrying an envelope. He shoves it at you.
3 Jump: If you can’t get from A to B, then jump to C or maybe V or Z.
Jump in time, jump in space. See where you land. Breathe it in.
There is some reason you’re here and not back there where you were lost and despairing. Try to imagine how this place or point in time is connected to the point in the narrative that had you stopped.
It may be the heart of the story, only you don’t know it yet. It may be something you need to know more about but didn’t recognize until now.
Look down this rabbit hole. Jump. Free-write for a minute or two about what you see.
4 Begin your narrative in a new place. Begin just before the end, then look back. Begin in the middle and flash forward. Begin just before everything falls apart.
5 Read lines from these poems. Underline the words that rise up for you. Write three sentences, each with one of those words in it.
“The only way to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it
Into the body first, like small
wild plums.” ~ Mary Oliver “The Plum Trees”
“Where are you? I called
and hurried out
over the silky
sea of night
. . .down into the garden of fire.” ~ Mary Oliver “The Gardens”
“Listen, whatever you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body.” ~ Mary Oliver “Humpbacks”
“So I walked out one night under the full moon
and agreed with my dead love
that the cold light on the backs of my hands
belonged most to me.” ~ Tess Gallagher “Glow”
“He looks back to the dream—the way
a violin might glance across a room at its bow
about to be used for kindling.” ~ Tess Gallagher “Deaf Poem”
“So love in a room now
can too easily make me lost
like a child having to hurry home
in darkness, afraid the house will be empty.” ~ Tess Gallagher “Infinite Room”
“Only then can I revisit that last surviving
And know with the wild exactness
of a shattered window what he meant
with all time gone when he said, ‘I love you.’” ~ Tess Gallagher “Infinite Room”
Anything will do. Just a single, revelatory word will be all you need.
Take a deep, cleansing breath that travels from head to toe. You’re back!
Say, “Thank you.”
And thank you for staying with this. I utilized all of these techniques, more than once, when I was writing my latest novel, I Will Leave You Never. I hope it all helps when you need a boost.
In the next blog post, I’ll be writing about the progress on my new novel, The World in Woe and Splendor, with all its ups and downs. It has been an interesting process, to be sure. I went places I never knew I’d go.
Finally, if you know of someone who might enjoy reading I Will Leave You Never or my previous work. Cuban Quartermoon, I’d be happy for a recommendation! And if you know of a book club that might read them, I always enjoy showing up for the discussion.
Hope all are well and doing fine.