There are times when it’s hard to write. For me, for instance, those are times when I’m either on my period or when it’s hot where I live. I have a very strong period and I don’t deal well with heat. So during those times, I need to figure out how to be productive without getting frustrated by my inability to put words on the screen of my word processor.
The trick is to find other things to do which have to do with your usual work. I write, but I can’t write as well when it’s hot or I have cramps, so during a recent week where both came together, I knew from Monday onwards that I wasn’t going to get much writing done. Instead, I opted for doing a few things other than my regular work. I plotted out stories I wanted to write at some point. I made new covers for books already done or plotted, so I wouldn’t have to do them during their release month, and I did some maintenance on my website to bring everything up to par.
There will always be times when writing is hard. You may have a lot of other stuff to do. You may feel sick or be tired or just not be your usual self. You may have to deal with a lot of things happening around you, may have to devote a lot of time to friends and family. You simply can’t find the energy or the time to sit down and write.
The first thing to do in such a situation is to ask yourself whether it’s really the situation which makes writing hard or whether you’re avoiding to write for other reasons. If it’s the situation, deal with it by either changing your writing schedule (if it’s possible), suspend your current project until things get better (if you know when they’ll get better), or do other stuff around that project instead (like my plotting and covers).
If your situation has changed long-term, you will have to renegotiate the time you can devote to your writing. You will have to make time for it somehow, even if it’s less than before, even if it means writing during different times of the day. You can do it - humans are great at adapting in general and at adapting to changes in their own life in particular.
If it’s just a short-time change, you can very well get something out of postponing your project for a few days or weeks. Take some time off, consume some more media, look up writing advice, perhaps have a look at your plotting and see if it needs changing or tightening. All of those things are a lot easier to arrange time for than to arrange time for sitting down and focusing on writing your story.
What if you realize it’s a ‘you problem’ and not a problem you have no control over? What if you do everything in your powers not to make time for your writing? Then it’s time to ask yourself why you do that. Is it lack of determination? Lack of discipline? Have you grown tired of the project? Is there something within the project which makes it hard for you to go on? All of those things can happen and there are ways to deal with them all.
Are you lacking determination? Ask yourself why. Is it your own laziness or is it your life? Do you need to reorganize your day to make more time to write and keep your energy up for it? Or do you expect too much, set your goals too high? Once you know why you’re no longer determined to work on your project, deal with the reason and continue to write.
Are you lacking discipline? Find a tool to make yourself stay with your work. I found that the Pomodoro method worked well for me, because it gave me well-sized bits of work time with a guaranteed break afterwards. Quite often, the discipline isn’t missing as a such, but you’re not ready to spend too much time at once with your project.
Have you grown tired of the project? Then it might be time to take a step back for a moment and do something else. Charge up your internal batteries again, do some stuff you love. Give yourself the permission not to work on the project for a while. If, like me, you always have several projects ready for work, switch to another for a while. It can help tremendously with that sort of problem.
Is there something in your project which keeps you from working on it? That is often due to some subconscious knowledge that there’s something going wrong. Check your project, look at the plot, at the characters, at what you’ve written already and what you want to write next. Quite often, you’ll come to realize that there is something you need to change. Change it and go on writing.
Quite often when there are thing stopping you from working on your project, there’s goals involved. You’re setting yourself a goal that is too high. You’re setting the wrong goals for yourself. You’re not giving your project the importance it deserves.
Of course it would be cool if you could get up at five in the morning, write for two hours, then make breakfast for the family, take the kids to school, do your eight hours of work, keep the house spotless, spend a lot of time with your kids and your partner every evening, and then go to bed in time so you can get up at five the next morning. Reality is different, though. We’re not machines, we can run ourselves to the ground.
Adjust your goals. If your life is so full of other things, then, instead of wanting to write every day, set time aside during the weekends. Bram Stoker mainly wrote “Dracula” during his vacation trips with his family, yet he still got it written (within ten years). Your life will, most likely, not revolve only around your project, there’s other projects as well, like your family, your job, or other hobbies which keep you grounded. Negotiate time for each of those projects, see how much time you need, want, and can give to each of them.
In other cases, you want to write a perfect book and compare your rough first draft to the finished, edited, and polished work of a professional author. Of course your project isn’t looking like that. The first draft of that other work didn’t look like that, either. The first step is always to get the story into bits and bytes (‘on paper’ isn’t quite correct any longer). Don’t worry about your wording, about your grammar, about the mistakes you’re making. Get the story down and out of your system. Then you give it some time to settle and yourself some time to gain a distance from it, after which you look at it again and start removing all those problems. That’s how people do it. Don’t try to do it perfectly on the first try, nobody does.
The other extreme is to treat your project as something casual, setting the goals very low and never really paying attention to it. In this case, you need to find out whether you really want to continue with the project. If it’s not important, there surely are a lot of things you’d rather do. Keep the project somewhere until you’re more motivated to work on it.
Readjusting your goals is always a good first step in such a case. Make sure to treat your project correctly, give it the importance it deserves, yet also be realistic about what you can accomplish. That’s the secret to meeting your goals. And meeting your goals is the secret of how not to be frustrated with your writing.
If there are bad times in your life, you need to readjust your goals accordingly. That may mean taking a break from your project or giving it less time each day. It may mean you’re going to readjust your goals and admit that you can’t be the perfect prolific writer you wish to be. Once you have realistic goals in mind, it’s usually easy to work on something again. It’s not the project in most cases, it’s the goals. If it’s not the goals, there’s usually something within the project which needs changing. Change is always the key, though, no matter whether to the goals or to the project.
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