Writing in Circles, in Cycles

Photo by Daniel Fazio on Unsplash

I’ve only written one Medium post during the entire month of July. Not exactly a great practice for someone who’s supposed to be writing a blog post at least every day — and, ideally, is shooting for two a day.

But, sometimes, you just lose the plot.

Even as one of my stories was being featured and receiving tons of attention — more attention than just about anything of mine has ever received, I was running out of ideas. I had scraped the bottom of the well. Everything that I had written felt unoriginal, boring as hell. It seemed to lack cohesiveness in my brain.

I also had trouble with working on my novel.

It’s like I was trying to walk, trying to breathe, through quicksand. Everything happened slowly. Nothing connected. Nothing went anywhere.

I’m a big believer in daily practice; that the way to get the thing done every day is to sit down and take a swing at it. Shaunta advocates doing 10 minutes a day, having some kind of tangible goal.

Last week, I was down to 5 minutes a day on plotting my novel. Five measly minutes a day (well, a couple of times a day) because that was all the water my brain could hold.

I did it, but it was terrible.