When Writing Gets Hard

This post was originally published February 11, 2019.

Draft 1

When I was younger...

Draft 2

It’s not you. It’s me.

Draft 3

Like famed musicians Queen and David Bowie, I am under pressure.

Draft 4388

Okay, look. I don’t know how else to say this. I’m burnt out.

Winter is coming in waves along the coast of Maine. One minute we’re battered by snow and the next we’re battered by rain. All this has really left us with are endless sheets of ice. I bought snow tires to prepare myself for this, and yet, my car still gets stuck. Instinctively, I lean on the gas pedal. The tires spin, the rubber starts to smell, and I let up, only to have dug myself a nice little hole, trapping my tires even more.

America has built a dream on the foundation of working hard. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. They pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and they put their nose to the grindstone. All their blood, sweat, and tears will take them the extra mile, and after they kick it into overdrive, they’ll finally see the fruits of their labor.

But there’s a problem with this. The average work week has climbed to nearly 47 hours, and only 13% of people enjoy going to work. Working hard has dubbed millennials the “burnout generation.” Because this philosophy means that good things happen when you’re doing everything right, but when bad things happen, you fall into a cycle of self-doubt and self-criticism. If you just worked harder, pushed the gas a little longer...

Sometimes, when the tires don’t seem to be working hard enough, they’re actually trying too hard to grab hold of the icy ground. This can often be remedied when I turn off traction control. The tires stop working so hard, I slide myself back into motion, and I get on my merry way.

Sometimes hard work doesn’t correlate to positive results. This took me an long time to understand.

For years, school served as the perfect template. Everything made sense even when the class material didn’t. You go to school to do well to get into highschool, college, maybe even grad school. You spend your life working hard to graduate to the next level. This is how you make money, society says. This is how you have a future.

Then you graduate for good and you still don’t know what your future is supposed to look like and the future is happening now.

Three years ago, a study showed that over half of college students didn’t know what they wanted to do with their career, and I’m willing to bet that number has only increased. I’m also willing to bet that most of them do have a vague idea of what they want their future to look like: to have kids, to travel the world, to get rich enough to buy a home somewhere warmer than where they currently reside.

I have a vague idea too: Having my writing published.

So when I struggled to find work in a limited job market, I turned to my writing. Because when nothing else makes sense, my writing does.

There’s something private and purposeful about art. Maybe people with other passions would agree. Sometimes it’s an outlet, and sometimes it’s a tether to an otherwise chaotic abyss. That’s how I was feeling: caught in an abyss. My life’s structure had been stripped away. My template torn apart. I was trying to figure out how to build a new one.

As I pushed out job applications, I worked frantically on a couple short stories. One, I finally finished after starting it in 2016. After over a year, I finally created something beautiful.

And I hated it.

Okay, that’s maybe a little bit of an overstatement, but I read it over like a disappointed mother. Somewhere in the process of trying to write a perfect piece for publication, I lost my voice. I didn’t know the author who resided in that writing, but I knew it wasn’t me.

So I did what I felt I needed to do. I took that story and the other flash fiction piece I had written and submitted them to countless, well-researched publishers. That, after all, was what I was supposed to do. I was shocked at how little I cared when the rejection letters started coming in.

Then I started researching blogging, reading all about creators who lived their lives through self-started blogs and websites. I started to learn about branding and marketing, how to hustle so your content has an audience.

In March, I got a job housekeeping. While some people might turn their nose up at cleaning toilets for a living, I didn’t really care. It had a purpose, and I finally had an income.

Only three weeks later, I got another job. This one came with a salary, health insurance, and a retirement account. It had all the dressings of an adult life. With two jobs, I felt like I was finally going somewhere.

Except the only place I went to was work. I never saw friends, never did anything for fun, and I wasn’t travelling, which was integral to the brand I was building with my blog. It was a decision I wavered over for weeks, but I did it. I quit my job housekeeping.

Time was starting to present itself to me, but something funny happened. I stopped writing.

My book went untouched. I was still throwing short story submissions into the universe, only to have rejection letters thrown back at me. I fussed over my site’s functions, kept pulling resources to learn Search Engine Optimization and coding, and later restarted my instagram, but no matter how hard I tried, even after making time and getting a car, I struggled to create content.

For most of my life, I've been told that the way to get over writer’s block is to treat your writing like a job and to just keep writing. But that’s what I had been doing. I was always working on something, and for everything I worked on, there were five more things that needed work too. My problem wasn’t that I didn’t treat my writing like a job, my problem was that I did. American work ethic and all.

It was worse than any writer's block I felt before. It was like my creativity was drained out of me. There was a vacancy in my mind where ideas used to be. I couldn’t think of new short stories. I couldn’t think of new blog content. It just wasn’t there. Not a tumbleweed of thought rolling through desolate space. Anything I pieced together was desperate, and I put it on the page because I felt I had to, not because I loved anything about it.

The chaos was growing, and my tether was breaking in my hands. I couldn’t seem to fix it.

The worst part was that I was breaking it.

By Thanksgiving, I forced myself to stop. December rolled around, and I still wasn’t writing. I didn’t feel like I could. I opened my saved documents, my outlines, and I stared at them. A year ago, the mere thought of them would excite me. Now, I was left uninspired. My creative well was flooding with the feeling of failure. My inability to make myself write felt like I was just throwing in the towel on my biggest dream.

One day during my sophomore year of college, I met with my forensic anthropology teacher after failing my first exam. I confessed that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my degree. I liked anthropology, but I didn’t know where it would take me. I had my doubts about archaeology at this point and now it seemed like forensic anthropology wasn’t for me either. She told me that finding what you want is like walking through a forest. You’ll come up to a tree that you don’t like, so you’ll move on to the next. The whole forest will be filled with trees you don’t like, but there will be some that you do, and you’ll just keep going until you find them.

I don’t want to build a business around my blog. Not right now at least. I never did, and yet I spent a year stressing over identifying my brand and building it. I consumed so much travel media, suppressing the facts that sometimes I don’t have time to travel and sometimes I just don’t want to.

I spent last year doing things for the sake of having a direction, but I learned I didn’t like most of those things. I’m trying to appreciate the value of that. Now I’m walking away from those trees, I’m turning off my traction control, and I’m moving on.

I read over my older writing pieces, trying to fall in love with writing all over again. After slogging through a few thousand words in my book, I’m getting excited again. Short story ideas are teasing me in the periphery of my mind. I can’t quite grasp them yet, but I feel like I will at some point. There’s no rush. There doesn't need to be.

My creativity engine isn’t up to full capacity yet. I wanted to have this post published a month ago, but writing it was a struggle. It wasn’t just about getting words on paper, it was about getting real with myself.

So what’s next?

After some thought, I’m giving up my brand. I love my blog, but I’m done letting it stress me out. I’m not swearing off travel content, but I’m not limiting myself to it either. There are so many things that spark my curiosity, and I want to chase them, even if that means I never leave my seat.

I don’t know what it’s going to look like yet. Just better. I’m working on moving to a different web platform, since Wix isn’t providing me the creative liberty I want. I’ll be sure to make an announcement when that happens. Hopefully, you’ll find my next blog post there.

Looking back, there are some posts that didn’t get the justice they deserve. My Lake Champlain series is one of them. I was caught up in a format and a word count that didn’t let me fully embrace my creativity. Rewriting that series into something I’m proud of is at the top of my list.

If there are any past blog posts you’d like to see me retackle, let me know in a comment or directly through email.

A lot of change is coming, and I’m really excited about it. I wish I could offer a schedule for posts, but I can’t right now. I promise that when they do come though, they will be bountiful expressions of creativity and curiosity. I wouldn't want my writing represented by anything else.