When it’s not working, maybe there’s a better way

Last week I had a very bad writing day…one of those days where everything seemed to go wrong, where ‘writing’ looked a lot more like ‘procrastination’, where I battled the thought ‘this is terrible’ all day long.

Here’s the thing: I know the book idea isn’t terrible. This is the book subject I’ve been talking about for over a decade, this is the book I’ve most wanted to have already written, so I can give it to every client and every friend and every acquaintance, because pretty much everyone I work with or meet needs this book.

But still, it wasn’t flowing. It was such hard work – I felt like I was driving an unfamiliar car, constantly stalling, unable to find first gear, kangarooing wildly, never finding a smooth drive.

In the end I took to Twitter and declared “I’ve forgotten how to write”.

I thought maybe because I hadn’t done any book writing for a while, that perhaps I’d literally forgotten how to sit my ass on my chair and write. It could have been that…although I usually write a weekly article for my blog and my Lovely List, so that reasoning didn’t make that much sense.

I couldn’t figure out why it was so damn hard.

In the evening, I did my morning pages (yes, I often do them in the evening) and the words flowed out about how difficult a writing day it had been.

And then out of my pen flowed the solution…scrap what I’d done and start again.

Part of me was horrified by the idea of scrapping 15,000 words. Another, wiser part of me, felt the rightness of it.

As it was, the first draft was not working, was not coming together, had more holes than swiss cheese. For this project, I need to pull together material written in blog posts, over a period of 10 years.

And it just wasn’t going to work the way I’d started it.

With book 2, I had experience of starting a book and coming back to it 2 years later to complete. I ended up rewriting most of the first half and I’m convinced that it would have been better if I’d scrapped the first lot and started again.

But I couldn’t bring myself to do that with 25,000 fully formed words!

At least with book 3, approximately half of the 15k words that I’ve scrapped are half-formed sentences and ideas that need fleshing out.

So now, I’m starting again. I’ve got index cards to be created, with every blog post idea that I want to use (and there are hundreds). Once that’s done, the hope is that the book will flow more easily, and I can write afresh based on my index card ideas, rather than trying to fit together words written at different times, for a different medium.

(Which is like trying to put jigsaw pieces together that are from different jigsaws.)

Anyway, I didn’t just want to regale you with a tale of what writing life is really like (as opposed to the fantasy of easily reeling off 30,000 words in an afternoon then spending the rest of your week with your feet up), I wanted to illustrate a point.

Sometimes when things aren’t working, it’s not you that is the problem, there is just a better way.

So if there’s something you’re struggling with right now, something in your life that feels like it’s stalling, kangarooing and you can’t find first gear; take some time to explore if there’s a better way. It might mean ditching 15,000 words, but in the long run, it might just make your life a lot easier.

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