So you’re stuck with your writing. You should be off writing the next chapter in your novel, but instead you find yourself screwing around on the internet or scrubbing the grout in the bathroom (or starting a magazine) – anything to avoid writing.

You know that this is unreasonable. You’ve read about writer’s block, and read a thousand logical ways to get past it. You know that there’s nothing personal about rejection, that you’ll never get anywhere without persistence, that you have to believe in yourself, that no art is perfect, that you only improve by taking risks and learning. You know how to find support and you know how to find inspiration and you know how to manage your time.

You know all this, and more. So why the hell aren’t you writing?

Good news: it’s not because you’re lazy or broken or not a “real writer.”

The Real Reason You’re Not Writing

You’re not writing because, despite all those lovely logical things you know, the most primitive part of your brain is afraid. It has nothing whatsoever to do with logic, and attempting to solve the problem with logic isn’t going to get you anywhere.

It’s called the flight or fight response. When it kicks in, the sympathetic nervous system takes over and your brain actually stops listening to logic. This can be a good thing: if you are being stalked by a giant robot with death lasers in its eyes, you don’t have time to think. You need to react instantly.

However, it’s not so useful when you’re trying to write a novel. You need to find a way out of the flight or fight response, so that you can listen to reason again. You need to find a way to let your parasympathetic nervous system, which controls rest, balance out the freak-out actions of the sympathetic nervous system.

Luckily, that’s easy.

Just Breathe

I’m going to share a breathing exercise I learned in yoga. Alternate nostril breathing is a great way to balance the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems.

As you get more comfortable with this practice, you can work on deepening and lengthening your breathing – but don’t worry about that to start out. Just breathe at a comfortable pace.

1. Sit up comfortably. Curl your middle and index fingers in toward your palm. Put your thumb beside your right nostril, and your ring finger and pinky by your left nostril.

2. Close off your left nostril. Inhale through your right.

3. Now close off your right nostril and open the left.

4. Inhale and exhale through the left nostril.

5. Close the left and open the right.

6. Inhale and exhale through the right nostril.

Ten or twenty breaths like this should make you feel noticeably calmer – but you can keep going as long as you want.

Now try some of that logic on yourself. Or maybe you’re calm enough now to just start writing.

Bonus! Another Sneaky Brain and Breath Trick

While you were practicing alternate nostril breathing, which nostril seemed more constricted? The difference may be subtle or obvious, but when you pay attention, you’ll notice it.

If the right nostril was more blocked, this is a great time for creativity.

If your left nostril was more blocked, this is a better time to balance your checkbook or update your submission tracking spreadsheet.  

Why?

Because: one hemisphere of your brain is dominant at a time. This actually switches every 90 minutes (or every 3 hours, in some sources). It’s a lot easier to write when the right hemisphere of your brain is dominant.

The dominant side of your brain has more blood in it. There’s also more blood in the nostril on that side of your head, and this constricts your breathing a little.

Try it!

I’d love to hear how these techniques work for you. And if mind/body tools like these are right up your alley, check out my other venture, Shivamonster.

Just write.

That’s what we’re supposed to do, right? That’s what we’ve trained ourselves to do. It’s what we tell people when they come to us, saying “I’ve always wanted to be a writer” or “I can never get past a first chapter.” We tell them, “Just write. All you have to do is sit down and write.” Then, usually, they hem and haw and walk off, while we’re left thinking that they don’t really get it.

Or maybe that’s not you. But that’s me. I’ve always been good at getting a first draft out—locking that inner editor in a room and knocking out a word count. No problem. If I got stuck, I would either set that particular scene aside—and the answer would hit me later—or I would steamroll through it, no matter how awkward it felt, determined to fix it in the next draft. Sure, it would take more coaxing to get to revisions, but the first draft? That was cake.

Then, I broke my back. In four places. (I’m a “go big or go home” kinda girl.) Writing became harder. No, scratch that—writing became horrid. While the front of my brain was in story and setting and plot and plans, the back of my brain was constantly chanting mybackhurtsmybackhurtsmybackhurts. I’d take Advil and reposition myself and try to focus, but in every quiet second, between every thought, that chant came through. Like I’d left the radio on low and promptly misplaced it.

The pain affected my day job, too, since I also write for a living. I asked my boss to move me to something more technical (which ended up being editing) because simple writing tasks were taking three times longer than they should have. It’s not a big deal, I told myself. It’ll heal soon enough, and I’ll be back in the game.

That was in August 2011. It’s presently the tail end of June 2012, and this blog post is the first prose I have written in months. I had surgery in January (I’m now a cyborg, by the way), and kept waiting for the drive to come back. Or maybe just the inkling. Or, at the very least, to not feel dread and disdain at the very thought of actually making words happen.

Injury does certain things to your brain. It did several things to mine—it made me afraid, for one. As August grew into September grew into October, I became more afraid  that the pain would never stop. That I would never feel normal again. I was afraid that I would never achieve my full range of motion, that I’d never not have to wear a back brace or walk with a cane, that I’d never be able to focus on my job.

I tried to deny that fear, because I wanted to be above it—and most of the time I could be. But every day, it would sneak in a little more. As I grew more afraid, I grew angrier. Angry for letting myself be afraid, angry at my situation, angry that I couldn’t even pick up my own fucking cane when I inevitably knocked it to the ground. (What was I, helpless? I’d been self-sufficient for a number of years—what was this “I can’t perform a simple task” crap?)

The toxic combination of fear and anger affected everything, including the relationship I was in at the time and my writing. Or rather, the way I thought about my writing. It was just another thing I couldn’t do, like standing up without wincing or emptying my own dishwasher. Another thing I was supposed to be able to do.

The simple act of writing this blog is a step for me, because I am writing. I am making words happen for the first time in months. The anger and the fear have drained away, and I’m left with the underlying confidence that I like to believe is at the core of my person.

“Just write” is simultaneously great and terrible advice. It’s fantastic when you know you’re just stalling (“no, really, just one more episode of Dr. Who, and then it’s straight to work”), but when you’re trying and failing and trying and failing, the surety of the words can convince you that you’re not a “real writer” anymore. Particularly when you’re the one doing the pushing. I wanted to want to write—I had this strange desire for a desire that is hard to describe or even really explain. I wanted to enjoy it again, not loathe it or fear it. I wanted to just push past it, but I really couldn’t.

What I did instead was something completely new to me. I’d bought a ukulele in February for fun, and about a month later, I surprised myself by writing a few songs—something I’d never really done before. Even though I still couldn’t write prose, it turned out I could write plenty of songs about the issues that weighed heaviest on my mind. It was sort of like setting a journal to music, and it was exactly what I needed to keep my head in the game. I think that’s what it takes—even when you’re so far away from your own writing: if you can stay connected to any kind of creativity, you have a pretty good chance of coming back around eventually to what you really mean to be doing—the way you really mean to be writing.

Everyone is different, of course, and my reactions to injury may not be yours. At the end of the day, though, whether or not you’re going to call yourself a writer has a lot to do with how willing you are to give it up. If you’re still fighting for your craft—even in ways you may not recognize as fighting—then you’re probably not out yet.

Turns out, it’ll take more than a broken back to stop me. What will it take for you?

For my recent trip to Portland (the Oregon, not the Maine), I had a short mental list of things I wanted to do. Powell’s, Voodoo Doughnuts, a glimpse of the coastline. The thing I wanted to do most, I didn’t get to do. I was hoping that a trip to the coast would inspire me to finally figure out a story that has been on the back burner for quite some time now. It involves that coastline, time travel, and the hope of a better future if we can just figure out how to send ourselves the right message.

I was hungry for the coast, for water and rocks and landscapes I don’t have at home, but the days fell together differently than I’d hoped and we didn’t reach the coast. Still, something unexpected happened which gave me water and rocks and new landscapes. An unplanned excursion to Multnomah Falls took my breath away–and helped anchor my current novel’s voice in my head.

Multnomah Falls was nothing I expected. Didn’t expect to go there and once there, didn’t expect to find such beauty and inspiration on what seems to be nothing more than the side of a highway. Beyond the parking lot and through a tunnel beneath the highway, the world changes. It opens up into a space of soft greenery and a trickle of a river over smooth stones. Farther on, a six hundred and eleven foot waterfall spills.

To view the falls from the base is staggering. It’s the best place to contemplate the entire height. At the very least, you will also want to hike up the trail, to reach the Benson Footbridge (1914) where the mist of the falls can smudge your glasses and trickle into your shirt collar. I think you can hike even beyond that, but we called it good at the footbridge.

The air was cool up there, and wet. Moss grows on everything, even the stones. Standing on the bridge, pieces of my novel began to assemble themselves in my head. Though one piece of that novel is unrelated to water and falls, it still said “hello, here’s how I actually work, now go write me.” Through my camera lens, I saw my heroine in her watery environment, trying to reconnect with it even as I tried to connect with my fiction.

Unplanned, unexpected. When my mind was given a detour, it found the right path anyhow, and offered up exactly what I needed–even though I didn’t know I needed it. Maybe it’s not about sending ourselves the right message after all; it’s about letting the right message find us. Anne Lamott tells us we aren’t blocked when we stumble in our writing, but that we need to refill the well. Rather than trying to control how that well refills and checking things off a pre-made list like a boss, let yourself stay open to opportunities that may arise.

Where are you going this summer? Wherever it is, I hope you find yourself detoured in one way or another. Don’t frown or fuss; you may well find something you need on that path.

Shimmer author Milo James Fowler joins us this week, to talk about the writing challenge he created, thanks to Ray Bradbury.

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What makes someone a literary legend? Does he have to live long enough to see his work become popular? Outlive his critics? For many writers in the past, a true fan base only developed posthumously.

Not so with Ray Bradbury. Novels, short stories, poetry, plays—his body of work is loved the world over. But once upon a time, he was just a struggling young writer in love with the craft. He wrote a short story every week, polished it up, and submitted it to a magazine. Rejection letters flooded in, mainly due to his prolific submissions. But there were also acceptances along the way, and they inspired Bradbury to keep doing what he loved: telling stories as only he could.

Seeing him at the Escondido library in the fall of 2009 was a surreal experience I’ll never forget. He spoke about being a “lover of life,” and that, for him, writing was always a labor of love. He told us that night, “If you can write one short story a week—doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing. At the end of the year, you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done.”

A year later, a reader commented on my blog that I seemed to be announcing a short story publication every month. I responded by saying that compared to Bradbury, I was nowhere near as prolific, but that someday I hoped to follow in his footsteps.

“Someday” turned out to be 2011.

It was time to take the proverbial bull by the horns and see if I could do it: write and submit a new story every week. And since misery and joy both love company, I decided to invite fellow writers Simon Kewin and Stephen V. Ramey along for the ride. Thus, Write1Sub1 was born. Now with over three hundred participants this year, we’re still going strong, and I can honestly say I’ve grown as a writer because of this challenge.

W1S1 has forced me to take my writing seriously and carve out a chunk of time for it every day. It’s also taught me how to deal with a deadline—how to write fast and revise slow, and to get my work off the hard drive and into an editor’s inbox. Along the way, I’ve created some of my best work. “Soulless in His Sight,” appearing in Shimmer #15, is one example from Write1Sub1 Week 9 last year. It’s a story I’m proud of, but it’s just one of 52 that wouldn’t exist without this challenge and our supportive community of writers.

Thank you, Mr. Bradbury, for inspiring us. You told us it could be done, and you were right

Beth and I have been talking–a lot–about drag queens. We discovered we both love RuPaul’s Drag Race to distraction – and we’ve been applying the show’s timeless lessons to the rest of our lives. So here’s what drag queens have taught us about writing.

1. Be confident

You can tell a confident writer from sentence one. They know where the story is going and will hold you firmly by the hand as they show you all the marvelous things. The confident writer strides much as the confident queen, certain that she will not trip on the hem of her gown or twist a heel. Is that spotlight in your eye? Stay focused on the way it must be setting off the glitter in your eyeliner! Chin up, fingers on the keys. Go.

2. Learn the skills

Those bitches who don’t know how to sew are screwed.

Every craft has a skillset, whether it be mastering a sexy walk in high heels or learning the proper placement of a semicolon. Read a book or two on the skills; learn the rules (yes, you betta work!) so you can know exactly how to break them and still look fabulous doing so.

3. Tuck your junk

We told you above to learn the skills: now complete the illusion by making it look effortless. Just as a drag queen tucks, and shaves, and makes sure the silver lame gets trimmed properly before she hits the main stage, writers need to refine their work to really make it shine. Did you spell-check? Do the sentences flow? Is everything in the story really necessary, or do you need to murder some of your darlings? When you’re ready to share your work, be clean, be tucked, be fierce! (Ref: point one.)

4. It’s not enough to be pretty

No matter how pretty that final draft is, it’s not enough. It needs to be a good story, told with passion. It needs fresh, strong ideas. It needs to touch our hearts. Lead us to a strange new country with your words, and make us fall in love with it.

5. Commit wholeheartedly to your own extraordinary vision

Your vision won’t be right for everyone. What was she thinking–all that silver lamé fabric lookin’ like crumpled tin foil exploding from a trash can… (What was she thinking, a blog post about what drag queens taught them about writing…)

But that’s okay. Because the thing is, wholehearted commitment is stunningly compelling. The best queens make even the most ridiculous outfits look magical, simply by their commitment to their vision.

I wrote a while back about that insane blue jay who comes to visit. He struts his stuff like any drag queen would, even on the uneven fence edge. He trusts, he commits, he throws his whole self in. Do the same with your vision.

Put the bass in your walk

Ultimately we’re all just lip synching for our lives. Good luck, and don’t fuck it up.

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Stock image from Becs_Stock on deviantArt