Three years ago, I wrote 50,000 shitty words for NaNoWriMo 2022. Recently, I re-opened that document and spent hours poring over an atrociously written plot with atrociously written characters. It felt like meeting up with an old beloved friend. Amidst the nonsensical filler scenes and unfortunate lack of continuity, I can remember the girl I was back then. Reading the opening chapter reminded me of my optimism and belief in the story — the idea that had snuck up on me during the pandemic when I was back in my childhood bedroom. But reading the ending few words? That reminded me that I’d written 50,000 words of garbage and not even finished the storyline.
The bones were there, but the story needed a serious makeover. I decided to seriously work on it again and immediately hit a roadblock. What kind of story did I want to tell again? What was the point of this story? Who is it for? I couldn’t answer any of these questions definitively and I kept getting stuck when trying to decide. So I thought I’d switch gears. I opened up a fresh document, decided to do some practice writing to loosen up and not take things so seriously. I came up with a vague idea, started typing, and… wrote a single sentence. That’s it. Total writer’s block.
This was devastating. It wasn’t the story, it was me. For some context, years ago I was the kid who wrote prolifically. I scribbled in notebooks and stayed up late to churn out convoluted chapters on Wattpad and Fanfiction.net. Even as recently as a couple years ago, I was doing NaNoWriMo and spending holiday breaks writing short stories. And here I am today, wondering where that energy went.
So what’s the issue? The best I figure, it’s a mix of lack of practice, life stress, and self-imposed pressure to write something unique and perfect and awesome. My brain just isn’t functioning the way that it used to, and it’s time to fix that. I’m tackling this in a couple different ways.
Firstly, I’m scheduling weekly creative writing sessions for myself. Just an hour or two — whatever I can manage. The goal is to produce something vaguely good, even if it doesn’t make total sense. In an ideal world, I’d be able to do this every day, the way I did as a kid. Unfortunately, kid life is vastly different from adult life, and I just don’t have that kind of time available these days. I’m hoping that as I train my brain to be more creative again, I’ll feel more joy and excitement about the writing process which hopefully will make me more motivated to write during my self-allotted rotting time.
Secondly, I started a new writing endeavor. A little series where I post my favorite bits of media I’ve consumed every week. This is a dual purpose initiative. Obviously, it forces me to regularly do a bite-sized amount of writing. Just some little blurbs here and there summarizing my thoughts on a particular piece of media. However, it also helps me with a secondary objective — consuming higher quality media. I’m a doomscrolling queen and I really don’t want to be. Having this weekly series forces me to pay attention to what I’m consuming. It forces me to evaluate media and think critically about whether it makes the cut or not, and then it forces me to write down my thoughts in a digestible manner.
And lastly, I’m slowly trying to take my posts here a bit more seriously. This is probably the strategy that I’m least committed to of the three. Why? The weekly writing practice is to relearn the skill of creative writing. The media consumption series is to thoughtfully consume media and effectively communicate my thoughts on it. But this blog is very much a personal brain dump type of situation. It’s for fun. It’s for me to look back and remember who I was during any given month. So yeah, I’ll probably cut myself some slack if I come back next month on the last day at the last hour and write some shitty 10 line blog post. That’s life. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to be more polished in my writing here as well.
And there you have it. That’s my three-pronged approach to retraining my brain. Yes, all three prongs are basically just to write more. Yes, I think that’s really the best way to fix myself. Some people might argue that reading more helps too, but I do read a lot and it hasn’t seemed to help unfortunately. So I’m sticking with this plan and seeing where it takes me.
