Day 173: Nonproductive Days

Some days, I just cannot come up with any new material. I'll write a sentence, delete it, write it again, delete it again, over and over until my brain waves start to flatten out and my thoughts disappear into pit somewhere at the bottom of my skull. It's so weird because usually I can just keep writing even if the first sentence is bad and then come back and fix it. Sometimes I just can't do it though, and I have yet to figure out why or how to fix it when it does happen. I always have to come back hours later, or even the next day to get it working. Thankfully there's always enough material in the backlog that needs editing for these moments, so I'm never left with nothing at all to do, but it's still annoying.

I was having one of those days today, so I started editing some recent chapters as usual to make up for the lack of productivity when something occurred to me. Editing involves a lot of rewriting, which would seem like it would be plagued by the same problem, but for some reason it isn't, at least for me. If I know what I want to write it's no problem to get it out. Which makes me think the real issue when I have these unproductive days is not knowing what to write. Kind of obvious in hindsight, and given that every major author's advice is 'write until you have something more to write about the next day,' maybe I should have figured it out a long time ago. I kinda always knew that, but it's not like I already know exactly what I want to write when I sit down to begin with. It's very fuzzy, but what I want to get down hovers between known and unknown. When I 'know' what I want to write it's like walking through a fog. When I don't have any idea it's like walking in the dark. I never really know exactly what to write until it's on the page, but I have some direction most of the time.

Anyway this is all just to say that I think I have a solution to my nonproductive days problem. I usually come up with what I want to write on the same day I write it, but what if I took the end of the previous session and used it to plan the next day's scene instead? I do this anyway, just not consciously, so it won't be much of a difference between doing it by daydreaming and doing it by actually plotting something on purpose. At least, I hope.

Writing a novel feels like solving a bunch of silly problems that were all obvious in hindsight. Maybe this will help me out from now on, but it still makes me feel kinda stupid in the short run.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley