Friday, October 9, 2015

How to deal with bad writing days?

Last week I thought I would have one of the worst writing days of my life. To me it felt like everything was falling apart and that I had no clue what I was doing. Pretty much nothing that I wrote made sense anymore and I felt that I was going crazy.

At that moment I didn't know what to do. I wasn't really used to having bad writing days. Usually I'm somewhat confident that I can rewrite and fix things relatively easily. This experience was something that I felt was pretty new to me.

I didn't really feel like continuing writing, because I thought things would only get worse.  If I'd continue doing what I was doing, I was afraid I would hit the rock bottom. That could only lead to bad things happening to me.
 
So I decided to do something else so that I could relax a bit.  I went out to get some fresh air because I had to get away from what I was trying to do. Even if the break would only last for like ten or fifteen minutes, it might help.

Fortunately that little break helped to clear my thoughts a bit and made me feel less anxious about what I was supposed to do. I didn't feel as overwhelmed about my task -  a task that wasn't really that complicated. I managed to get back to work again.

I thought about why the stuff that I wrote didn't work. I came to a realization that just because what I wrote had initially looked good, it didn't mean that it made sense in reality. It mostly made sense in my imagination.
 
I was willing to reconsider my thoughts and I was willing to adjust. No matter what it would take, I would make my stuff work again. Nothing would be off limits this time. After all, I wasn't married to my initial thoughts anymore.

I would take out things that didn't work. I would be willing to kill all my darlings that weren't as good as I thought they were. I'd also be willing to just write and I wouldn't set the bar too high for myself this time.  

So I tried again - and about two or three hours later I had managed to almost finish my task. I had fixed most of the problems that had made me feel desperate and hopeless just a few hours ago. What I had written made a lot more sense now.

It wasn't exactly the best thing that I had written, but the end result was probaly still good enough. I had managed to overcome my obstacles - and luckily enough, didn't have to suffer from having a really, really bad writing day.

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