neil gaiman

I am legitimately asking myself this question. I’ve not done any creative writing since the outbreak of the pandemic. Not the kind I want to do anyway.

No ideas. No drive.

There seems to be a distinct lack of will or desire to sit down and wrack my brain for words that might conceivably end up becoming a story. Indeed, whilst I have had plenty of ideas in the past, nothing has excited me for a long time.

The pandemic, the lockdowns, isolation, the money worries – they all played their part, of course. None of it helped to motivate me to write creatively.

Yet, I still write. I try to post here (though we have seen that lately, I have not been as consistent as I wanted to be), and I also journal (also not exactly frequently).

Plus, there is my freelance writing, which helps pay the bills.

Maybe I am suffering from a creative block?

I know it isn’t so much the work of sitting down and putting words on paper. The problem is a lack of ideas. Or more specifically that nothing I come up with truly excites me.

I always jot down ideas. And never pursue them.

It’s not a lack of wanting to write, though. When I read Neil Gaiman, I want to write. Same for other writers I truly enjoy. They make me want to write. But what do I write when nothing comes to mind?

Putting one word after another isn’t going to cut it if they don’t make a coherent whole.

Let me digress for a moment. Lately, I have spent hours watching YouTube videos, but it turns out that I haven’t been doing so just randomly. I have been seeking inspiration and solutions. I watch the content I enjoy. And I have realized that seeking out creators whose content I enjoy is a manner of seeking out what seems to work. I want to figure out why it works.

Why do these creators appeal to me? What is it about their content that speaks to me? If I gave you a playlist of everyone whose content I watched lately, you’d find a surprisingly common theme in style, manner, and topics.

So, today I sat and pondered what everyone whose content I’ve been enjoying lately has in common and why they appeal to me. It is quite striking when you become aware of it.

Whilst it hasn’t quite cured my creative block, I am at least here now to post this. And it has got me thinking about my blog as well.

But more on that tomorrow. I still need to do more thinking.

Does it begin with an idea or with the mere desire to write something? I keep collecting ideas. I take a note on my phone. Or I use one of my many notebooks and jot it down.

To never return to it. Or to eventually return and wonder what I was on about. Or to discover that the idea had merit and might just be worth pursuing.

Then I do something else yet again.

Procrastination is the worst. One might argue that it serves its purpose. My all-time favourite writer, Neil Gaiman, is known to have taken ten or twenty years before finally turning one idea or another into a book. Coraline and The Graveyard Book spring to mind.

It’s not that I always just avoid writing. I mean, I love writing. I write every day. But working on an idea sometimes seems to require an incredible amount of effort. Deep down, I know it will be worth it to put in the effort. If only for my own sake.

Somehow, though, it seems impossible to even get started. An idea is not enough. I can keep collecting them until I have a whole book full of ideas. But that doesn’t make a story. It will never be more than a collection of ‘what ifs’. Starting points that never amount to anything.

That’s not what I want.

I had an incredibly lazy weekend. I don’t know whether I felt down or if it was the weather, which was too humid and occasionally too warm.

Perhaps I simply suffered too much sun on Friday, which is definitely a possibility as I was on assignment out in the morning and exposed to cloudless skies and a burning sun for more than three hours. I was pretty exhausted once I got home. Chances are, I needed the weekend to recover.

But I also promised myself on Sunday evening to be productive come Monday. I even made a to-do list for Monday and Tuesday. Thus far, I’ve ticked off all the items.

I also did plenty of writing, which was the main point. I kept the to-do list realistic and every time I ticked off an item, I felt satisfied. I’m planning on continuing that for the next few days and see how I go.

In any case, another item I will need to add is creative writing. Ages ago I had an idea for a story that has not left me, and I want to work on it. I’ve made a bunch of notes in a bunch of places and actually starting work on that might just be a good beginning.

When I started this blog, I had the idea of publishing the story in several parts here. It’ll be a while before I get there, but I certainly hope to have something publishable at some point.

I guess, when you don’t know where to begin, writing about it and sorting your thoughts is as good a start as any.

Story of My Life

Do I suffer from writer’s block?

Where do I begin?