So You Don’t Want to Write Today?

Motivations to write

I know. Me neither.

It’s nice and cozy in your little bed-nest and you’d like to forget the world outside the windows for a few more minutes or a few more hours or a few more weeks. I feel you, friend. Some days I want to stay under the covers. Some days I want to say fuck it, forget it, file that shit away forever.

But I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know that the fuck it days can become the best days if you struggle through the fuck-it-ness and get something done. When you hang in there, when you keep trying until the words come, when you’re the little kitten in the poster, the wild-eyed feline with one claw clinging, you learn more about writing than any easy day.

It teaches you about commitment. Stick-to-it-ive-ness, as my stepfather used to say. You learn how rewarding it is when you bring yourself fully to the page and overcome whatever obstacles have been keeping you from the work. It gives you confidence, and there ain’t a Faulkner-loving one of us who couldn’t use a little more confidence.

Here then is a list of things to do when you feel like saying fuck it. I’ve picked a few reasons you might not want to write, then given you ways to work through. Ways to make the fuck it feeling work for you, instead of fucking you over.

You’re grumpy

Make your character grumpy. An old man who shakes his fist at the sky. A young girl who wakes up on the wrong side of the world. A man without integrity whose integrity has been insulted.

Let them curse and stomp around. Let them throw little fits like a toddler in a grocery store or honk angrily at people on the highway.

What you do from there is up to you, but there’s great fun in having your characters say all the things you can’t.

The dishes need doing

And the lawn needs mowing. The floors need vacuuming and the windows need washing.

There’s always something clamoring for our attention. A whole world that would have us ironing and emailing, filing and filling orders, whatever it is we do for work. To put bread on the table. To feed and clothe our kids, to keep the house clean.

But what do you do to feed and clothe yourself? What about the wild lawn inside you, the one that doesn’t need mowing but does need trimming, and maybe a little time, to shape into your story?

What about your sustenance, sister?

Your story sucks

Unsuck it. Have your main character start calling everyone “Fuck-knuckles” for no reason. Give her a bionic arm. Her catch phrase is “Fuck all the way off” and she doesn’t give a shit what society thinks of her.

Write in a different genre for a few days. If you’re a poet, try some prose. If you’re a proser, study the rhythms of poetry. If you’re a literary guy, try on a genre and see how it fits.

Write by hand for a few days. Write in a different spot in the house. Use a voice recorder. Talk into a fan like it’s 1979. Write odes on the windows of the skull. Take a Sharpie to a truck-stop restroom out on I-70 near Salinas, Kansas, when the wind really begins to gather speed down out of the Rockies.

Your suckness is usually sameness. Try something different.

You’re mad about the last season of Game of Thrones

Use this as a learning opportunity. Look up pacing. Realize you probably shouldn’t condense ten episodes into six because it throws the pacing off, and people get pissed.

Political Shit

Write out your anger. Make a list of all your political grievances. All the ways and means they have found to fuck us.

Now figure out ways to forgive each politician. Or write a story in which men like these die horrible deaths. Call it fiction and do whatever you want with these assholes!

You’re overwhelmed

The world is overwhelming. We’re all whelmed in one way or another, under over upside down. Inside out, maybe. Words can be overwhelming, as can stringing them together into sentences.

For me the only thing worse is not trying to assemble them. I feel a little less whelmed when I’m working with words, arranging them until they make sense, which makes the world, for the length of that sentence at least, make sense as well.

You’re tired

Tired and unsure if it even matters. Tired of the sky falling, tired of the oceans rising, tired of the political fallout.

So write characters who aren’t tired. Characters too mad to be tired. Characters full of aim and anger. Characters who get shit done. Who aren’t taking this shit anymore.

Write characters with zero fucks to give and hundreds of scores to settle. Create characters who change the world.

Then have them change the world.

You don’t have any ideas

Ideas are everywhere. The sun refuses to come up one morning. Write about it. That old man who gave you the finger on the interstate was actually The Rock. Write about The Rock giving you the finger on the interstate.

There are only a certain number of story arcs anyway—haven’t we always heard that? Rages to riches. Riches to rags. A stranger arrives in town.

Other, lesser-known story arcs you can use: The floor is lava. Boy-girl meets girl-boy. Icarus flies at night so the sun doesn’t melt his wax wings.

Write about a place. A page in a book, the back of your knee. Write about love of: your mother, your father, your second-best friend, your third cousin. Write about loss of: your mother, your father, the big game.

Write about the back of your second-best friend’s knee. Lick the back of their knee, by which I mean if you’re stuck then create something wild and unexpected, with six arms and three plotlines and an extraordinary number of teeth.

It’s not that you don’t have ideas. It’s that you haven’t learned to see everything as story arc. Work on structure. How to set up a story. What choices do other writers make and what can we learn from those choices? Try to see everything—that butterfly lighting on the lantana, that brief afternoon rainstorm—as a narrative, an arrangement, a piece of music so beautiful men go mad to hear it.

It’s too hard

Oh honey, everything is hard. Everything good in this world is hard. From birth to death. From love to loss. From have to had.

It’s hard to write sentences of hope, considering how they hurt. Hard to write sentences of hate, angry as we might be, because those hurt as well, somewhere near the heart.

Some days I think of writing like the little mermaid in the original tale, whose transformation into a human brings her great suffering. The sea witch warns her that she will feel as if a sword is stabbing her, but she walks anyway, out of the ocean, the pain a part of her, knifing and slicing with every step.

Like she’s learning how much it hurts to walk around on this good earth.