How do you get unstuck?
What do you do when things aren't flowing like normal?
Can I make a bit of a confession?
The last few weeks, well… I’ve felt a bit stuck.
People often ask me how I keep up the heavy pace of writing that I do here, and I usually respond that the writing itself is not the hard part—it’s knowing what I want to write. If I’ve got a well-formed idea in my head by the time I actually sit down at the computer and start writing, it can pour right out of me nearly as fast as I can type.
Of course, I don’t always need to have a good, well-formed idea when things are really flowing, either. In writing as often as I do, I frequently put myself in the position of having a self-imposed deadline looming with nothing in the bag, and more often than not, I manage to pull it out. (Or, at least I hope I do.) Indeed, a large part of the reason I hold myself to such a rigid publishing schedule is because that particular brand of desperation has led to some of my most creative ideas and most well-received pieces of writing over the years.
(The most-read thing I’ve ever written—a piece that garnered literally millions of views and still crops up on social media from time to time six years later—was something I wrote in thirty minutes from conception to completion while eating lunch at my desk at an old job.)
When you’re on, you’re on, and even the wild swings can put one in the bleachers.
It’s not always that easy, though.
Perhaps it’s a function of rebooting after a brief holiday hiatus, or of the other stresses, pressures and obligations of a new calendar year, but for these first few weeks of January, writing has been a bit of a struggle for me. Instead of that ideal state of flow, it’s been an arduous process of me scribbling down ideas on Post-It Notes and throwing them out, of sitting down in front of my computer on a Tuesday night and staring at a blinking cursor on a blank Google Doc until my eyes start to hurt, of half-seriously asking my wife and kids if they know what I should write about.
My wife: “You should write about how fancy margaritas are almost always disappointing.”
(She’s right, but I’m not sure I can get a whole newsletter out of that.)
My son: “Have you read any good books lately? Or cooked anything good?”
(Yes and yes, but that’s what Fridays are for.)
My wife: “Billy Joel was just Elton John for homophobes.”
(It’s a shame she never joined Twitter, the woman can fire off a TAKE.)
My daughter: “Can I have a banana?”
(Yes. Just make sure you throw the peel out when you’re done.)
(IN THE TRASH CAN.)
I don’t want this to read as a complaint, nor as any sort of negative omen for the future of this newsletter. I love writing, and it brings me a great deal of personal fulfillment both to write and to be read by you. I also think (and hope) that this slump hasn’t been evident in the end-product work you’ve been seeing the last few weeks; I wouldn’t publish anything I wasn’t at least mostly satisfied with in the end.
Sometimes it just takes a lot more squeezing to get the same amount of juice, is all.
I know that this is something that’s happened before, and it is something that will surely happen again; I have to trust that it will pass just as quickly as it’s come, and believe that the best thing for me personally is to just power through until it does.
This experience has gotten me thinking, though—thinking about the different ways we each find to get ourselves out of slumps, whether they be creative, professional, athletic or any other kind.
And I’d love to hear your take on it.
How do you get re-set when you’re stuck?
What do you do when the flow gets interrupted, when things aren’t as easy as they normally are and you find yourself in a rut?
Do you go for a long walk, or go to the movies?
Is there a familiar piece of writing or other art that you turn back to for inspiration?
Do you wander off into a secluded cabin in the woods and isolate yourself for years until your manifesto is finally done? Or do you just wrestle with a big dumb dog?
I’d love to hear your methods.
Heck, I might just use some of them myself.
Otherwise I might end up writing about margaritas and Billy Joel.
—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)
UPDATE (10:15am / 1/18/2023)
It was pointed out in the comments below that—completely unbeknownst to me when I wrote this out of my own desperation last night—Katie Hawkins-Gaar wrote about almost exactly the same experience just yesterday. Her post is worth a read, and this furthers my belief that it’s a specific post-New Year kind of funk that I’m in:
There has been some great stuff on the ACBN lately you might’ve missed:
“The Lucky Penny” — a short story about a childhood talisman:
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Mario” — making sense of my children’s latest obsession:
And, of course, there’s the Friday Newsletters, every week.
Last Friday’s featured a delicious corn chowder, a long-forgotten cocktail, music/book/TV recs, reader pets and more!
That Billy Joel take has me shook. Straight fire.
For unsticking one’s self try doing something completely new (but within your physical ability if you can’t cliff dive, don’t do it). For me it was curling.
I’ve had an interest in it for a long time and finally did a learn to curl a while back and the aspect of going into something completely foreign and learning a new skill (even though it has minimal usage outside the curling sheet) just kind of clicked something inside me.
I now go most Sunday evenings. And if anyone needs 40lb chunks of granite slid across some ice, let me know.
It's a checklist. Pilots don't use checklists because they're dumb, it's because they're smart, but overwhelmed. The list allows you to see everything that needs to be done, and marking things off gives you a sense of accomplishment.
I don't know if that works for creatives, but I know it's how I get unstuck.