Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
-Samual Tayler Coleridge, Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner
During a recent blog interview with Morgan Bailey, I was asked if I ever suffer from writer’s block, and I responded that to me it’s more of like the writing doldrums–periods when I just can’t seem to catch any inspiration, even a breeze of it, and the writing on my page appears lifeless and flat. I suppose it’s all these weeks by the sea, watching sailboats out on the ocean at the mercy of shifting winds, that’s got me thinking of these periods of writing stagnation.
My son, a history buff, tells me that before motors were invented, sailors were sometimes caught in the unforgiving stagnation of the doldrums for weeks at a time. Sometimes, they were forced to throw their horses overboard to catch wind and escape the deadly calm (although why they wouldn’t eat the fresh meat instead, I don’t know). Even in these mechanized days, my sailor friend tells me it’s not all easy sailing, that life on a sail boat still involves a lot of waiting for the right kind of weather to come, or the wrong type of weather to leave.
Unfortunately, with writing, there is often a deadline, and these slow periods can be tough to handle. Most of the time, I just keep at it, but when the writing turns so dry as to threaten to flake right off the page, there’s a few things I do to try to catch some wind:
1. Sightseeing: This involves taking myself and my characters outside the house and down the street to look at new shops and exhibits. My favourites are fabric stores, small art galleries and cheap antique sellers–sometimes all I need is a 1970s pineapple pattern to trigger an idea for a new scene.
2. Poetry: I’m one of those writers who are always reading for inspiration, and when the novel gets too complicated and sticky, I turn to poetry. The immediacy and emotion in good poetry inspires me to get out of my characters’ heads and into their hearts, to see the problem differently, and to remember the power of a few simple words well chosen.
3. Throw the horses overboard: Sometimes, when things get stuck and won’t move, it’s because there’s too much weight on board the ship. Like Mark Twain, who often talked about having to throw his characters down the well, there are time I have to cut a character or two so the story can start to move. Painful as the process is, it’s also liberating sometimes to kill off the dead weight that’s dragging a story down.
4. Pretend it’s the first time: A shaman I met used to talk about ‘practicing beginner’s mind’, to always approach your life and your passions as if it were the first time. This is a handy trick when facing the doldrums, to write as if it were the first time you ever attempted a story, with no expectations and with all the excitement of something new.
And when these don’t work? Then I try to sit back and wait it out, maybe watch a sunset or two and enjoy life outside the book. Might as well enjoy the calm, because a storm will be coming my way again soon enough.
And speaking of that, it’s back to the sun and the surf, and my vacation on Manly beach, where there is more than enough wind for any sailboat to catch the breeze.
