The Writing Blahs: When You Don’t Want to Talk to Your Imaginary Friends

This post is a day late, for which I apologize. I don’t belong to those people who are terribly organized and have a stack of prewritten blog posts ready for the days when they have the flu, an urgent business meeting, or just no idea what to write. I’m an INTP, and the P stands for procrastination.

But! This delay actually serves a higher purpose. I was forced to conduct a self-experiment on how to treat the other dreaded affliction besides Writer’s Block: Writer’s Blah.

Also lovingly called ‘The Doldrums’ – like ‘consumption’ for tuberculosis: it sounds nice, until you realize what it is. In the case of ‘the doldrums’, it’s that apathetic, don’t-give-a-damn feeling that engulfs you one morning when you should actually be sitting at your desk, typing away on your story.

Writer’s Blah doesn’t have the acute pain of Writer’s Block; no panicky feelings of “I’ll never be able to write another word in my life,” no desperate banging of your head against the wall or your keyboard. It’s sluggish, low-key, like the London fog that comes out from nowhere and shrouds everything. With Writer’s Block, you’re desperately racing around grasping for distractions from the existential whiteness of your blank page; with Writer’s Blah, you serenely amble past your laptop, noticing but not caring for the blinking cursor.

You know that meme that Writer’s Block is when your imaginary friends stop talking to you? With Writer’s Blah, you let them taste their own medicine.

But there comes a time when you wonder why you suddenly lost all appetite for your writing. You know that there’s nothing majorly wrong with the story or with you (another thing that sets the Blahs apart from the Block), so why can’t you find the energy?

Because that’s what it is, an energy thing. There are numerous theories circulating the web about the cause of this apathy; I think the three most likely ones are:

You are physically exhausted

Maybe you just had the flu. Maybe you’re working overtime and your life consists of nothing but sleep and work (and eat, but that’s overrated). Maybe you don’t get enough sleep, and maybe you’re generally out of shape and should hit the gym. You are a member, after all, even if you haven’t shown up there since September.

2016.

Come on, admit it.

Whatever the cause of your physical exhaustion, fact is that your body is tired. And though we tend to forget it, the brain is also a part of that body. So if the body is down, the mind follows. If you suffer from depression or anxiety, I bet you’ve noticed that it always gets worse when your energy runs low. It’s as if you can’t operate the normal screens anymore, and everything hits the command center (“Keptin, shields are down to thirty percent!”)

You tore a brain muscle

(Yes, I know it’s not a muscle!)

Could be you just did too much of a good thing. I’ve been writing that series of mine since April 2016. I’ve written every single day, with the notable exception of four months of Writer’s Block, which I spent hitting my head against the keyboard every single day. And crying writerly tears (they are like manly tears, just more badass). And I have an output of roughly 2000 words per day. Add to that the revisions and after revising, incorporating the suggestions of my dear beta, and you have a whole lot of writing happening.

And I guess there comes a point where all that accumulated writing power implodes. Machine fatigue. That drone you hear may be your brain overheating.

Just kidding.

Something else demands your attention

And I’m not talking about binge-watching Longmire.

No, I mean big, urgent things like someone in your family falling ill, your car breaking down and you have no idea how to pay the repairs, your company downsizing and you’re worried you could be one of the people they ‘have to let go’ – things that make your red alerts go off (I’ll refrain from quoting Star Trek this time… barely).

You have more important things to worry about right now, although it would be nice if you could distract yourself by hanging out with your imaginary friends.

 

So – what to do?

It depends on the cause, of course. If your life is currently in emergency mode, you probably don’t have the time to read this. You take care of the emergency first, hang out with your MCs later.

If your body demands that you sleep, move, and lay off the pizza, that’s what you do – take a few days off to establish some healthy new habits. If you’re too introvert to consider the gym, walk the dog more often (you do have a dog, do you? Do I even have to ask this? You can also walk your cat, by the way. I don’t accept excuses).

If you overstrained your brain, give it something else to do. Ideally, it would be something that doesn’t involve words, but isn’t totally passive. I spent my weekend learning paint.net and doodling a cover for the first story of my series. It was a very meditative experience, if you count ‘goddammit’ as a mantra.

It was non-verbal, creative, and I can even use it on Wattpad. Win-win-win all around.

As you can see, the medicine worked: I think this is my longest blog post so far. If you have found ways to battle the Blahs, do share – who knows who you’ll help with your tip!