And the wall is blank
February 3, 2020 12:40 AM Subscribe
I used to be very creative, but for the past few years, my mind feels like it's hitting a wall when I try to think of stuff. What is causing this blank, and how do I go back to where I was?
I used to write a lot, fanfiction, what ifs, etc., and always had ideas for the next great story. These days, I have a hard time coming up with anything. I thought maybe I was using the internet too much, spending too much time on TV Tropes etc. and blocking my own creative juices by overthinking stuff, but I'm not sure that's it. I still daydreamed a lot until a few years ago, recently it's been pretty blank inside my brain.
I do not take any antidepressants (I went off the last one two years ago after one year of use), only thyroid replacement hormones and a progesterone pill to fight my endometriosis (been on it for almost four years now). I don't feel particulary depressed; I am functional, I meet friends, I can get excited about stuff. I read fiction for fun. I use the internet a lot, though. I also generally ruminate a lot, and fairly randomly these days. I also live in a foreign country and generally switch between that language and English, without much chance to use my native tongue. That said, I have almost always read fiction exclusively in English and it didn't use to a problem ten years ago.
This happens when I'm between jobs/semesters and when I am fully employed. I have had stressful jobs or studies, but I had those before and still wrote and thought. In fact, writing helped me with the stress of high school and bullying. I would imagine myself as someone cool with awesome friends, or as a Pokémon trainer or in Hogwarts. I still love Pokémon, so I sometimes try to visualize my cool life as a trainer when I have trouble falling asleep, but it's hard to really grasp one story and stick with it; my mind keeps jumping around.
I wish I could go back to writing a lot, and having ideas. Looking at advice blogs or books about writing doesn't seem to help, I always get stuck when it's time to visualize what I want to happen. It really feels like my brain hits a concrete wall sometimes, where there might be ideas behind it, but I can't cross it.
What is happening, why is it happening, and what do I?
I used to write a lot, fanfiction, what ifs, etc., and always had ideas for the next great story. These days, I have a hard time coming up with anything. I thought maybe I was using the internet too much, spending too much time on TV Tropes etc. and blocking my own creative juices by overthinking stuff, but I'm not sure that's it. I still daydreamed a lot until a few years ago, recently it's been pretty blank inside my brain.
I do not take any antidepressants (I went off the last one two years ago after one year of use), only thyroid replacement hormones and a progesterone pill to fight my endometriosis (been on it for almost four years now). I don't feel particulary depressed; I am functional, I meet friends, I can get excited about stuff. I read fiction for fun. I use the internet a lot, though. I also generally ruminate a lot, and fairly randomly these days. I also live in a foreign country and generally switch between that language and English, without much chance to use my native tongue. That said, I have almost always read fiction exclusively in English and it didn't use to a problem ten years ago.
This happens when I'm between jobs/semesters and when I am fully employed. I have had stressful jobs or studies, but I had those before and still wrote and thought. In fact, writing helped me with the stress of high school and bullying. I would imagine myself as someone cool with awesome friends, or as a Pokémon trainer or in Hogwarts. I still love Pokémon, so I sometimes try to visualize my cool life as a trainer when I have trouble falling asleep, but it's hard to really grasp one story and stick with it; my mind keeps jumping around.
I wish I could go back to writing a lot, and having ideas. Looking at advice blogs or books about writing doesn't seem to help, I always get stuck when it's time to visualize what I want to happen. It really feels like my brain hits a concrete wall sometimes, where there might be ideas behind it, but I can't cross it.
What is happening, why is it happening, and what do I?
Enough reading is important. You have to be reading enough that your brain easily slips into narrative voice over.
The right reading is important. You have to be reading stuff that grabs your emotions. It doesn't work to read the same old genre shallowly and without deep engagement. If you aren't getting invested in your books then it's no more help to prime the pump of the well of fiction than if you are reading a telephone directory or the same paragraph over and over again. When it became hard to find fiction that didn't seem a tired re-tread, I found that reading non fiction that got me excited and fascinated worked, but I still need fiction to retain the narrative flow. If all I read is non-fiction then my brain slides easily into lecture mode instead of into story mode.
Down time is important. That means no verbal processing, so no TV or podcast in the background, and not even music with song lyrics. This means no interruptions, because if you get two minutes to think, and then one minute to do work or interact with someone your train of thought will never get focused enough to inspire you. An excellent downtime is an hour's walk in a large park, or forty-five minutes in the bath, turning the hot water tap back on with your toes when the temperature starts to cool down. Insomnia is also useful. If you have periods of insomnia look at it as really valuable processing time and try to stay awake long enough to sketch out the characters, the setting and the plot in your head. Fight to stay awake long enough to get those thoughts in order.
Good oxygenation, decent blood sugar, plenty of sleep and emotional stability are important. If your brain is sluggish because it is not decently nourished and isn't getting enough oxygen to process, or if you are producing too many distress chemicals so that you can't stop ruminating then your brain will fail to make the many connections required to do the jumps of inspiration. Good physical condition to prevent wooly-headedness is important. It's okay to have strong emotions, such as anger, because that can help you write stories about angry characters, but you have to have the ability to switch in and out of the anger state.
What I think of as synaptical growth is important. As your brain ages you prune synapses and there are fewer random connections you can make. But random connections are part of writing. If you combine the thoughts bedpan, wilderness, roses, King Arthur and sleepiness, you have enough disparate elements to build a story around. But if when you think bedpan you only go as far as sanitation, guzunda, bed, bedside carpet, slippers you're running into a channel that has little contrast and few jumps, so your story is going to be extremely predictable. If your brain slides too far into that predictability you end up with predictable slice-of-life description and the story has nothing to justify going to the trouble to write it. So build synapses by exposing yourself to ideas and images that are new. Read outside of your own interest zone. Read outside of your genre. read stuff that is different enough that you remember it and get new ideas.
Analyze other people's writing and explain to yourself why they wrote what they did. Look at paragraphs and scenes, and passages of dialogue. Look for imagery and description. Think about the mechanics of writing, and all the building blocks, and observe how they are put together instead of just reading on momentum.
You can troubleshoot what part of your inspiration is missing. If you are not easily visualizing, then try closely watching films, possibly with the sound off so you don't get distracted into just following along with the plot, and particularly focus on how the camera moves and how the sets have been put together and the nuances of the way the actors move, when they raise their chin and what it conveys, etc.
If the words are not tumbling out then do more reading and read new styles and new genres. If your conflict seems boring, read or watch things that make you frustrated with the plot and direction of the story. If you don't care if the girl gets the girl at the end of the movie or not, you won't be inspired to re-write the same story only better, and set on a space station, whereas if you throw your arms in the air and complain that she never should have settled for the boy and stomp around the house for ten minutes shaking your head at why-did-they-write-it-that-way, you are likely to bring some of that feeling of knowing what should happen to the keyboard when you want to write fiction.
Test your concentration by seeing if you can do similar cerebral exercises. Can you lucidly narrate the plot of books or movies or history that you know? If you are failing at clear and lengthy narrative production because your thinking becomes muddled or you get distracted, or it just hurts to try to force yourself to do something so boring, you will know that it is a concentration issue.
Go back to old wounds, and examine current anxieties. There is a whole genre of cli-fi written for and by people who are writing and reading to process and deal with their fears of climate change. Look for unresolved issues in your psyche and see if they are ready to be the grist for your writing mill.
Move on from those themes that you always used to write. If you always used to write romances and aren't writing them now it may be because you are in a different place in life and are no longer looking for a life partner, or know what kind of life partner you can get and have settled, or are no longer waiting for Princess Charming to rescue you. In that case look for themes to write that have to do with the things that engage your hope and worry now.
Try writing poetry. Starting a writing session with a few lines of poetry is a good way to focus.
Try writing parodies of good writing, or gender bends of it, or versions of it set in a different location and genre. Can you weave a murder mystery through the plot of Pride and Prejudice? Kill off a minor character and make the killer be another minor character and see what happens. Can you rewrite Pride and Prejudice set on the space ship carrying the tiny group of surviving colonists to Mars? I know you don't want to, but how would you do it if you did want to? What would you change and what would you have to leave the same?
Write the worse possible fiction you can bring yourself to write. Sometimes maturity gives us an eye that spots the flaws and implausibilities in our fiction. When you are a beginning writer Deus ex machina, Mary Sue and deeply derivative fiction don't make you self conscious, and neither does the knowledge that you sound like a bad knock-off Hemingway. It's hilarious how the writing we do early in our development which we feel is tough and cynical and a bit edgy later appears oh so immature and naive. This can make you feel like you write too badly to do it. I struggle with writing where I decide what I want to write is way too implausible, or is too close to wish-fulfillment fantasy. But Cormac McCarthy got a Pulitzer for "The Road" where the climate had been devastated so that all the plants had died and had everyone except his protagonists surviving by eating other humans, with women apparently breeding babies so they could be eaten, which is mathematically absurd, and managed to get his characters halfway down the eastern seaboard of the US pushing a shopping cart including over territory where the roads had been half destroyed, which, as anyone who has struggled to actually get to the other side of the produce section with a sticky wheel can tell you, requires either a superhuman suspension of disbelief or very little experience whatsoever with shopping carts. So write that bad, unconvincing, schlocky fiction and hug it to your heart and snicker at it, even as you cry at the bathos you create. When Dickens was writing serial novels a crowd of people met the boat from England to find out if Little Dorrit had died. You cannot possibly be a worse writer than some of our most celebrated authors. You just don't have the editor and publisher they did. You are more likely to make money from bad fiction than you are from good, and more likely to receive prizes for it, but it also nourishes delight far better than objectively good fiction does.
Put yourself on a writing schedule where for an hour every day you look at a blank screen or a blank page. Set yourself a writing goal that if after fifty-five minutes of just staring you haven't completed at least one page, you will fill that page at top speed with words that have no meaning, no purpose, barely any grammar, no direction and no value, whatever occurs to you at the fifty-five minute mark, that you can rattle out to fill the page. This time is your place holder, your commitment that writing is something you want to do and want it badly enough to fight for the time to do it.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:44 AM on February 3, 2020 [9 favorites]
The right reading is important. You have to be reading stuff that grabs your emotions. It doesn't work to read the same old genre shallowly and without deep engagement. If you aren't getting invested in your books then it's no more help to prime the pump of the well of fiction than if you are reading a telephone directory or the same paragraph over and over again. When it became hard to find fiction that didn't seem a tired re-tread, I found that reading non fiction that got me excited and fascinated worked, but I still need fiction to retain the narrative flow. If all I read is non-fiction then my brain slides easily into lecture mode instead of into story mode.
Down time is important. That means no verbal processing, so no TV or podcast in the background, and not even music with song lyrics. This means no interruptions, because if you get two minutes to think, and then one minute to do work or interact with someone your train of thought will never get focused enough to inspire you. An excellent downtime is an hour's walk in a large park, or forty-five minutes in the bath, turning the hot water tap back on with your toes when the temperature starts to cool down. Insomnia is also useful. If you have periods of insomnia look at it as really valuable processing time and try to stay awake long enough to sketch out the characters, the setting and the plot in your head. Fight to stay awake long enough to get those thoughts in order.
Good oxygenation, decent blood sugar, plenty of sleep and emotional stability are important. If your brain is sluggish because it is not decently nourished and isn't getting enough oxygen to process, or if you are producing too many distress chemicals so that you can't stop ruminating then your brain will fail to make the many connections required to do the jumps of inspiration. Good physical condition to prevent wooly-headedness is important. It's okay to have strong emotions, such as anger, because that can help you write stories about angry characters, but you have to have the ability to switch in and out of the anger state.
What I think of as synaptical growth is important. As your brain ages you prune synapses and there are fewer random connections you can make. But random connections are part of writing. If you combine the thoughts bedpan, wilderness, roses, King Arthur and sleepiness, you have enough disparate elements to build a story around. But if when you think bedpan you only go as far as sanitation, guzunda, bed, bedside carpet, slippers you're running into a channel that has little contrast and few jumps, so your story is going to be extremely predictable. If your brain slides too far into that predictability you end up with predictable slice-of-life description and the story has nothing to justify going to the trouble to write it. So build synapses by exposing yourself to ideas and images that are new. Read outside of your own interest zone. Read outside of your genre. read stuff that is different enough that you remember it and get new ideas.
Analyze other people's writing and explain to yourself why they wrote what they did. Look at paragraphs and scenes, and passages of dialogue. Look for imagery and description. Think about the mechanics of writing, and all the building blocks, and observe how they are put together instead of just reading on momentum.
You can troubleshoot what part of your inspiration is missing. If you are not easily visualizing, then try closely watching films, possibly with the sound off so you don't get distracted into just following along with the plot, and particularly focus on how the camera moves and how the sets have been put together and the nuances of the way the actors move, when they raise their chin and what it conveys, etc.
If the words are not tumbling out then do more reading and read new styles and new genres. If your conflict seems boring, read or watch things that make you frustrated with the plot and direction of the story. If you don't care if the girl gets the girl at the end of the movie or not, you won't be inspired to re-write the same story only better, and set on a space station, whereas if you throw your arms in the air and complain that she never should have settled for the boy and stomp around the house for ten minutes shaking your head at why-did-they-write-it-that-way, you are likely to bring some of that feeling of knowing what should happen to the keyboard when you want to write fiction.
Test your concentration by seeing if you can do similar cerebral exercises. Can you lucidly narrate the plot of books or movies or history that you know? If you are failing at clear and lengthy narrative production because your thinking becomes muddled or you get distracted, or it just hurts to try to force yourself to do something so boring, you will know that it is a concentration issue.
Go back to old wounds, and examine current anxieties. There is a whole genre of cli-fi written for and by people who are writing and reading to process and deal with their fears of climate change. Look for unresolved issues in your psyche and see if they are ready to be the grist for your writing mill.
Move on from those themes that you always used to write. If you always used to write romances and aren't writing them now it may be because you are in a different place in life and are no longer looking for a life partner, or know what kind of life partner you can get and have settled, or are no longer waiting for Princess Charming to rescue you. In that case look for themes to write that have to do with the things that engage your hope and worry now.
Try writing poetry. Starting a writing session with a few lines of poetry is a good way to focus.
Try writing parodies of good writing, or gender bends of it, or versions of it set in a different location and genre. Can you weave a murder mystery through the plot of Pride and Prejudice? Kill off a minor character and make the killer be another minor character and see what happens. Can you rewrite Pride and Prejudice set on the space ship carrying the tiny group of surviving colonists to Mars? I know you don't want to, but how would you do it if you did want to? What would you change and what would you have to leave the same?
Write the worse possible fiction you can bring yourself to write. Sometimes maturity gives us an eye that spots the flaws and implausibilities in our fiction. When you are a beginning writer Deus ex machina, Mary Sue and deeply derivative fiction don't make you self conscious, and neither does the knowledge that you sound like a bad knock-off Hemingway. It's hilarious how the writing we do early in our development which we feel is tough and cynical and a bit edgy later appears oh so immature and naive. This can make you feel like you write too badly to do it. I struggle with writing where I decide what I want to write is way too implausible, or is too close to wish-fulfillment fantasy. But Cormac McCarthy got a Pulitzer for "The Road" where the climate had been devastated so that all the plants had died and had everyone except his protagonists surviving by eating other humans, with women apparently breeding babies so they could be eaten, which is mathematically absurd, and managed to get his characters halfway down the eastern seaboard of the US pushing a shopping cart including over territory where the roads had been half destroyed, which, as anyone who has struggled to actually get to the other side of the produce section with a sticky wheel can tell you, requires either a superhuman suspension of disbelief or very little experience whatsoever with shopping carts. So write that bad, unconvincing, schlocky fiction and hug it to your heart and snicker at it, even as you cry at the bathos you create. When Dickens was writing serial novels a crowd of people met the boat from England to find out if Little Dorrit had died. You cannot possibly be a worse writer than some of our most celebrated authors. You just don't have the editor and publisher they did. You are more likely to make money from bad fiction than you are from good, and more likely to receive prizes for it, but it also nourishes delight far better than objectively good fiction does.
Put yourself on a writing schedule where for an hour every day you look at a blank screen or a blank page. Set yourself a writing goal that if after fifty-five minutes of just staring you haven't completed at least one page, you will fill that page at top speed with words that have no meaning, no purpose, barely any grammar, no direction and no value, whatever occurs to you at the fifty-five minute mark, that you can rattle out to fill the page. This time is your place holder, your commitment that writing is something you want to do and want it badly enough to fight for the time to do it.
posted by Jane the Brown at 3:44 AM on February 3, 2020 [9 favorites]
What fairmettle said, though having a small pen and a couple of index cards in your pocket during your walk is something Anne Lamott suggests in Bird by Bird In addition to leaving all digital behind, do some writing by hand when the muse appears.
posted by Elsie at 8:23 AM on February 3, 2020
posted by Elsie at 8:23 AM on February 3, 2020
One thing that's known to do this is sleep deprivation. I've also heard of this as a temporary menopause or perimenopause symptom, if that could be applicable to you. But a lot of what we think of as "getting older," especially in middle age, is apparently sleep deprivation related rather than aging-related, so I'd see if you can get some extra sleep for a while and see if your brain spins back up.
posted by Lady Li at 10:10 PM on February 4, 2020
posted by Lady Li at 10:10 PM on February 4, 2020
I feel this, a lot. If I'm honest with myself, constantly, now. For me, it's exhaustion. Physical, mental, lack of sleep, stress... these last few years have been ROUGH.
I'm trying to fight it, and once in a while I get these tiny little bursts... but I can't seem to maintain it. Pretty sure I need rest to regenerate.
posted by stormyteal at 9:49 PM on February 5, 2020
I'm trying to fight it, and once in a while I get these tiny little bursts... but I can't seem to maintain it. Pretty sure I need rest to regenerate.
posted by stormyteal at 9:49 PM on February 5, 2020
This thread is closed to new comments.
I make time for it; I don't let myself get caught up with statistics (steps, distance, speed, time, records, etc); I don't create an elaborate schedule because it's simply every day rain or shine; I don't carry my smartphone (no music, podcasts, etc) nor even my pen and notebook; I walk the same safe, quiet route every day; I listen to my thoughts and feel my feelings without interrupting them or trying to interpret them; I walk at a comfortable pace in a natural rhythm; I don't beat myself up if I have to miss a day for injury or illness or dangerous weather, nor do I continue to use them as excuses after they've passed; I make sure I have the simple equipment needed (a broken-in pair of comfortable unfancy athletic shoes, unfancy clothing for all weathers, a windproof umbrella); when I first started, I didn't overdo it, I ramped up to my now standard hour long walk because that length just naturally fit me, then once it became routine I avoided the temptation to make it longer; I walk alone so that I don't have to coordinate schedules, be dependant on an other, or be distracted by talking, however I happily go on an additional walk with my partner as time permits because walking conversation is such a healthy pleasure and benefit to our relationship; I don't dwell on the corollary benefits such as my weight loss and improved physical and psychological health, because they are simply secondary benefits to the simple lucidity of my daily walk.
posted by fairmettle at 1:35 AM on February 3, 2020 [11 favorites]