Overcoming my Writing Rut

For most of 2021, I’ve felt like I was in some sort of writing rut. I didn’t write an essay for my newsletter on January 21, the first time I skipped a newsletter since September. The ideas just failed to come to me, I wondered if the well of writing had run dry — that I’d exhausted all of the things that I could possibly say with my limited range of experience. That, as long as I continued to live in the same four walls doing the same five things, I could no longer find new things to talk about.

I didn’t want to accept that my love of writing could just wither and die like that, so I went searching for answers. My first suspect was my consumption, or lack thereof, as I had started dedicating increasing amounts of my time and energy to Tiktok. I deleted it and started to look for alternative ways to fill my time.

At first, I was reading books — ripping through 7 volumes in the month of January. Then, I turned my attention to my computer. Around this time two weeks ago, I had around 200 unread emails and 20 open tabs gnawing away at my attention, subconsciously. Over the past week, armed with an excess of caffeine, I’ve somehow tamed that beast — reading way too many articles, newsletters, and everything else that had been piling up in my inbox over the last couple of months.

And when I grew tired of the screen, I turned to my once-abandoned project of writing letters to my friends. I found my store of paper, stamps, and envelopes and began writing winding stream-of-consciousness epistles, some to folks that I barely knew. I drained my coffee and scratched the paper until my hand ached and the voice in my head needed a moment to breathe. I dropped them in the mailbox without proofing — I sure hope I didn’t say something compromising.

This past week, when I wrote my latest newsletter, the rut had been filled, and the words flowed out of me like the days that taught me how to love writing. I tap tap tapped away at my too-loud keyboard until I’d written something that excited me and time had stopped meaning anything and god damn did it feel good.

So on the other side of my creative block, I’m trying to diagnose what freed me. Was it the mass consumption of good art in the form of newsletters? Was it the stream of consciousness lettering that let me forget about my dreams of publication? Or, like always, is it just another case of nuance, something in the middle.

There’s that Rilke quote, “if your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches.” When I read it recently, it felt accusatory, but with time, I realized that I’d lost some sense of curiosity, the wow-have-you-seen-this-shit-this-is-so-cool lens that fuels all good art. With my free association letters, with my appreciation of my favorite newsletters, I was able to rediscover my curiosity.

My working hypothesis is that a healthy media diet (not just TikTok) plus consistent unconstrained output (stream of consciousness blogging, letter writing, journaling, etc.) is the optimal situation for creativity. That matches most ideas I’ve read about creativity (input affects output, creativity is a muscle, etc.).

But the unconstrained writing part feels important because it’s in contrast to the constrained writing that I’ve been doing, thinking about getting published. These ideas of publishing feel like poison like I suddenly have to consider the “market for my writing.” I don’t know how to do this yet, but there’s a part of me that thinks that I need to become a race writer, leaning into my “underrepresented voice,” in order to find a place at the table, maybe commodifying my parents’ experience for good measure. But for now, hell no, I’m not doing that. I’m gonna write what I want to write, and if it’s about race, that’s my choice. But punch me in the face if I ever write something due to some market pressure. For as long as possible, I wanna keep my writing free-range and market-free.