Making Time to Write Monday: Getting Unstuck

A couple of months ago, I’d been writing at a rapid pace in my hour every morning. It was pouring out of me.

Then it wasn’t.

My book that I’d been working so hard to revise was at a standstill, and I wasn’t happy about it. I could force myself to write, and I’ve read that’s what you are “supposed to do.” Just keep writing. I tried that, but I just hit a rock. The writing was terrible, and I knew most of it would be thrown out because it was flat, meaningless.

I looked back on my summer with dreamy eyes—my summer when I was writing a lot and reading a lot. I was reading lots of fiction at night. I was reading book after book after book. It fed my writing. I read things that were in a different genre than what I was writing, but it was okay. It inspired me to write.

At the end of a long and busy week at my day job, and a painful and unproductive week in my writing, I took a long, hot bath with a book. A fiction book. Within minutes I had to get out of the bathtub because ideas for my novel in verse started to flow, and I didn’t have paper in the bathroom with me.

It finally hit me. I hadn’t read any fiction in over a week. Why? That week my daughter had been diagnosed with multiple food allergies that change the way I have to cook. That week, I ordered several cookbooks and poured over them, taking notes, making grocery lists, reading food blogs. I was reading a LOT, but it wasn’t feeding my writing. Cooking does feed my writing, but that’s a post for another day. But this particular week, I was on a mission. A mission to rid my house of every allergen that she couldn’t have and refill it with healthy things she could eat.

When I finally took a break from my maniacal pursuit of recipes, and I dipped back into fiction, I was able to finally unblock my mind for my current work-in-progress.

It seems that every craft book I read has “rules” about what to read before and during the writing of a book. Some people think that you should read books like the one you want to write BEFORE you sit down to write. Heather Sellers suggests reading 100 books like the one you want to write before you write one word.

Last winter, I heard a poet speak about the craft of writing poetry. Someone asked him what he reads when he writes. He said when he writes poetry, he is always reading poetry. It gets him in the frame of mind.

Both points of view had excellent reasons, but for me, I haven’t yet adhere to particular rules (surprising for me because I’m a rule follower) with regard to what to read at a particular time. People who know me personally, will find it hard to believe I don’t have a spreadsheet filled with rules of what to read and when to read it (though it’s tempting).  I find that I can be inspired by just about any type of good book. When I finally had my “unstuck moment,”  I was trying writing a young adult novel in verse, but I read a middle grade adventure novel in the bathtub that day. What inspired me? The love of a story.

Reading always reminds me that I am meant to be a writer. I want to create books that someone will fall in love with.

And perhaps, I’ll be lucky enough to create a book that will send another aspiring writer scrambling out of the bathtub to jot notes for her own novel.