Let’s start with why you took a break: you fell sick and could not hunch over a keyboard. Your hands were so frail and shakey that even a pen couldn’t do the job. Or maybe the kids had a powerful wave of infant magic and for every waking hour during the past month, you were turning down fires or lighting others to cheer them up.
Does your job take most of the day? Did you start a new position and it’s been hard to keep up with the mental and physical strain? Did life hit you with a wave of bad karma and awful life-changing events?
Either way, one morning turned into seven, a day into three, and it’s been a few weeks since you wrote more than 100 words in a single beat.
How do you get back? How do you pick up right where you were a few months ago when you had finally started feeling your voice emerge?
You flip through a few of your old posts and smile, you sense the embers lighting up. You remember the taste of the fire all too well, the whipping fingers, whooshing across the keyboard in wild abandon, words splashing and tumbling, a volcanic release of mindnumbing gorgeousness!
You sit down to write today. Guess what goes out of those hitherto genius fingers?
Bird poop. Scaly, wriggly, monster moaning bird poop wrapped around commas and periods.
When you stop writing for a period of time, no matter how prolific you were, it takes almost twice the time of your break to get back to ‘the zone’.
I’ve experienced this multiple times. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sickness, life, or plain laziness.
Getting back to writing takes time.
Funny thing is, you’ll know that you’re missing something. You’ll know the words you conjure now are nothing close to your best. You can feel the regression, the words strain out of you: like squeezing dust for water.
No matter what you capitulate, you won’t get ‘it’ until it comes by itself. You have seen this from nearly every prolific writer you know, Elizabeth Gilbert said it well, Steven Pressfield calls it Turning Pro.
When you’ve lost your edge and you feel the pressure to perform at an otherworldly level — you must realize the answer to your pressure is in the question.
What you seek is not from this world; not from this physical realm you feel and see, and the only way you get it back is to act like it:
Prayer, meditation, showing up and doing your part, knowing all you can do — all you must do — is the work
The muse has her schedule. The only thing we can do is show up.
I know this well because I’ve lost it. I feel it. I know it. I’m currently in it as I write this and I know if I stop now, all the work I have done for the past week will send me right back where I was a few years ago.
The only thing I can do is write every day and that’s it.
The process is the process. Questioning it won’t make a difference.
As a creative, you accept that you are a vessel — a conduit. Your job is to ready yourself like an antenna does and allow transmissions to go through you.
But how do you do this with family? With work? With life? With everything that makes its way to ‘stop’ you? The endless sea of events vying for your attention?