Winter Writing Blues

(But first, happy birthday to my friend Grace :) And many more!!!)

Writing is a lot more difficult for me in the winter.

Well, most things are a lot more difficult for me in the winter. My body just wants to sleep whenever it’s dark out, there’s a whole new semester of classes, and illness* messes with my mood and appetite. But writing in particular feels like the hardest, because it’s the thing that requires the most emotional energy from me.

It’s weird: you’d think that something like acting or teaching would require more energy, because you’re speaking in front of other human beings. But instead, I find my survival instincts kick in. You can’t waffle your way out of giving a lecture the same way you can tell yourself you’ll write that next page “tomorrow.” So I hear myself project and laugh and make jokes/say my lines (depending on the situation), getting energy from the responses of the audience.

Writing is different.

Not for the reason you’d think it would be. Yes, I get into my characters’ heads, and, yes, that’s sometimes an unhappy place to be, but it’s never unpleasant for me. I actually love writing scenes of emotional turmoil and distress. (Mwa ha ha?) Writing is easiest when I care about what’s happening and the story flows naturally. I love reaching the climactic or near-climactic scene in which all the emotional build-up pays off.

So, no, the emotionally wearing part of writing has nothing to do with my characters and the various situations in which they find themselves. It has to do with me.

See, part of what it takes to write a novel or play or blog entry is willpower. You need the willpower to write instead of relaxing with some other, less labour-intensive activity; you need the willpower not to give up in the face of negative responses; and, most difficult of all for me, you need the willpower to shrug off creating something that’s less than perfect.

I’m always tired in the winter, so it can be difficult to make myself sit here at my computer instead of taking a nap. And, sure, getting a rejection from an agent or editor can cause a moment of self-doubt. But what takes up most of my energy and makes me have to push myself to sit down at my keyboard is dealing with the fact that my first drafts really, really suck.

It can require a lot of emotional stamina daydream to love the moving and profound epic in your head and then take a look down at the page in front of you and keep writing even though the two seem to be absolutely nothing alike.

I have vague, big-picture feelings about how I want this story to flow, but the nitty-gritty details of plot and causality and figuring out evocative ways to describe things weigh down my words. Why am I spending half this chapter detailing how my protagonist gets into a car? Does it really make sense to send them to another city for no reason? How did I manage to have my detectives at the grocery store picking out soup so they can eat something so they can pay attention in their languages class so they can understand the parrot who’s the only witness to the crime?

Sometimes, I need to write the extended grocery-store scenes to understand what really needed to happen instead. I know that about myself. I know that sometimes the only cure for writer’s block is to keep chipping away at it with more words. I know that a dozen pages of drivel can end in an “Aha!”, a flurry of paper into the recycling, and a new start to the current penultimate chapter. But, damn, that still doesn’t mean it’s easy.

Right now, I’m stuck about halfway through the YA scifi I’m working on. I hate this scene. It’s dull. There’s no exciting conflict between the characters. They just keep back-and-forthing: “Ya huh!” “Nuh uh!” “Ya huh!” “Nuh uh!” and there’s no reason for either of them to change. If writing a story is a bit like trying to make one’s way through a strange, dark woods, I’ve somehow emerged from the trees to end up at the edge of a cliff.

That cliff means I need to go back to the part of the path I recognize. I need to find the cross-roads where everything went wrong (I knew I should’ve taken that left turn at Albuquerque). But that place is a long way away, the hike back will be tough and tiring, and I still don’t know which road to try when I get there.

So I stay at the cliff for a while to get a better view. I skirt around the edge trying simultaneously to avoid vertigo and to see if maybe there isn’t a way down after all so I don’t have to turn around. Look over there, that’s a tiny ledge jutting out from the sheer rock, and only a few metres down. Maybe I can just ease out… lower myself carefully… find another foothold… uh, tomorrow. I mean, I could get down today, but Tomorrow Me will be so much bigger and stronger. I’ll leave the tough climb to her.

Sometimes, it takes weeks of leaving the climb to Tomorrow Me to accept, finally, that there’s no way down. Sometimes, it takes months to squint at the forest across the chasm in the distance and figure out the path I should have taken if I wanted to get there. All those days, weeks, and months are frustrating and emotionally exhausting: when you’re trying to get somewhere, not being able to move forward takes its toll.

And these days, in the winter doldrums, I don’t have much energy to give. So I work on accepting my current position and speed.

I try to add at least one sentence a day to even my stubbornest WiP and trust that when the spring sun returns, I’ll have inched my way so far along the edge that the new path will be blindingly obvious. I let myself know it’s OK to write just a paragraph if that’s what I need to be able to keep writing tomorrow. And when I come up with great character and plot ideas that I don’t have the energy to write to today, I let myself develop them in my notes while they’re still hot and fresh.

After all, when it comes to finishing a draft, take care of the sentences, and the chapters will look after themselves.

* Treated, but still annoying.