I was thinking of my writers today, and what words to offer them when they feel they have not one thought in their heads. Sometimes, when I come here, I feel like that. It’s not that there is nothing, precisely, but nothing funny enough or clever enough or interesting enough. The gremlins in my head say, ‘You can’t tell them that.’ It’s a horrible feeling, and I sometimes scold myself for it, because you might have thought that I would have got past that nonsense by now.
You are not alone, I told the writers. (I have a special group and I make them videos or write them little encouraging essays three or four times a week.) It happens to everyone. The Not Enough voices are universal.
And here is what you do. You set your timer for five minutes and you start moving your fingers across the keyboard and you don’t stop. If you are besieged by a big, fat nothing, then step into that nothing. Take that nothing out for a spin and see what it can do. There’s no point running away from the shame the nothing brings, or trying to ignore it, or locking it in a cupboard, or pretending it isn’t there. You walk into the storm, not away from it. It doesn’t matter what you write, as long as you form words. You might want to yell, at the top of your voice - I HAVE NOTHING. Or you might want to swear and wail. If all you can write is ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger,’ for five minutes, that is all right.
It’s breaking through the fear. That five minutes will smash up the blocks in your head and, if you type fast enough, you can outrun the gremlins, who may get bored and go and drink their dirty martinis in the other room.
It can be a rebel yell or a howl of defiance or just some antic idiocy which will make you laugh. The moment you start laughing, you are winning, because you’ve just reset your nervous system, and you are out of fight, flight and freeze and back into humanity. I once looked up what laughter does, physiologically, and there’s about a page and a half of its glorious effects.
And here’s the other thing - maybe, today, you aren’t fascinating or coruscating or filled with dazzle. That doesn’t matter. The main thing is that you show up: for yourself, for your writing mind, for your self-respect. It’s so easy to make an excuse and slink away, but that leaves a shadow of regret over you, and I don’t want to live in regret. I’d rather write something absolutely rotten than not write at all.
I love this idea, because it’s not just for writers. It works for nearly all forms of stuckness. Five minutes of Fuck It on the page can shift all kinds of the rubble and clutter which are holding you back. Five minutes, to restore yourself to movement. I’ve done that exact thing, just now, and I have gone from frowning to smiling.
I’m not going to edit this. In the spirit of the exercise, I’m going to leave it raw and unformed. I don’t know why I feel that’s important, but I do. We can’t be all primped and polished every day, we flawed humans. Sometimes, we have to show up in a bit of a mess and a muddle. But the thing that counts is that we are there.