In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using The Hanged Man to guide their discussion. They discuss the different tips and tricks they use to deal with writer’s block, whether that’s pushing through or allowing rest.
Question of the week: how do you handle writer’s block? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Transcript
JP: Hello friends. It is episode number 100 of the Write Away Podcast, And it is June 23rd as we are recording. I am your host, JP Rindfleisch my co-host…
Crys: Crys Cain
JP: Hi Crys. Happy 100th episode!
Crys: Happy 100th!
JP: We didn’t plan anything special. I’m sorry.
Crys: No, I’m really bad at any kind of anniversaries. Like I forget my own birthday.
JP: Yep. I do too. So…
Crys: So happy forgotten special day.
JP: Yay. How has your writing week been?
Crys: Pretty good. I have gotten a lot done this week. The least I’ve written was yesterday, which was about 200 words. Or was it the day before yesterday? I don’t know. I got 200 words, I think it was yesterday. Now I can’t even remember.
I feel like I did other shit yesterday, but now my brain’s like, no, maybe you didn’t. I did some contract work, but that was the day before that. So now I’m like I thought I had a really great day every day, but I have no idea what I did yesterday.
But I am almost done with the romance that my cowriter and I were working on that needs to be done tomorrow. The editor has already started going through it, but after tomorrow she’ll have all the chapters. Then I upload on Sunday, so I have Saturday to format.
This is living it high and close, fast and furious. I don’t know exactly what this is, but it’s really funny to be like living the rapid release life when you’re not still rapid releasing. That’s one of my goals to change going forward. I’ve considered spacing out the books that I need to finish in the series with my co-writer to about every three months and try and do my best to write them quite a bit ahead of time.
One of my goals has been to get a year or two out on my publishing schedule where things are written ahead of time. Sure, I could release them now, but like it’ll give me so much less stress if I schedule them out. Because one of the nice things about doing that is if I’m then two years out on my publishing schedule and just make that my runway, if I write anything extra in that time, I can also publish it. So I can publish faster, but still just have this long lead time in case something happens, like I get sick or burnout or whatever. #goals.
JP: Hashtag goals. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s how I feel.
Crys: How about your writing?
JP: It’s all right. It’s good. I am in the hotel life traveling for work and it’s nice because I’m in a different position with work where we’re more at sustaining instead of implementing. So we have a lot more control as to how we travel. Whereas before, it was cutting into work-life way too much. This is a little bit more controlled, which is really nice.
Crys: Does this mean less like swing shift and third shift?
JP: Yeah. It’s more like if I need to observe something and then I can make the decision, which is much nicer. So this week’s been good. I’ve been trying to adjust myself. And so this week I’ve been working on round — I don’t even know how to talk about these — like round two edits of post developmental edits. Because the first round of that was going through a lot of the track changes that my writing partner had gone through and either agreeing or adjusting those as I went, but I really wanted to focus on those bits.
Now I’m going through it with the eyes of a line editor because that’s where it’s gonna head to next. So I really want it to be in the best place it can be in before I hand it over to them so that they can spot the things that I’ve overlooked instead of the things that I know that I could find.
And so it’s nice because we’ve already sent it to this line editor, It was Zach Bohannan, and so I know what he looks for. So now I’m like, I’m trying to learn, more or less, learn as I go. So that’s where I’m at.
I had the mindset that I could somehow do 76,000 words in a week, which is false. But I’m on page 36 of 180. So I’m getting there.
Crys: Like 76,000 words of a line edit in a week is a full time job.
JP: I think you are correct.
Crys: When I’m going fast, so either the manuscript is super clean or I’m doing more of a proofread than a line edit, I can do 20 pages an hour-ish because I’m a freak and I track things. But so you’re talking what, 300 pages-ish?
JP: Yeah.
Crys: So that alone would be like 15 hours on a fast pass. Like at three days, that’s three days of five hours. But with a heavy line edit, you’re down to 10 pages an hour, five pages an hour, just depending.
JP: Yeah, I’m in that five to 10 pages an hour. So I’m learning how to appropriately track how I do things because I have no idea. It’s still a learning process for me. So that’s fun.
Crys: Delightful.
JP: At least I’m learning on my own work, right?
Crys: Yes. How much are you paying yourself, nothing?
JP: Nothing. Yeah. I don’t know, it’s been a good week. I would still consider it a good week. I just was miscalculating.
Crys: Indeed.
Okay. So for episode 100, we do have a really fun card to guide our questions. And that’s The Hanged Man. And I don’t know why, this is just one of my favorite cards. Not like particularly because I have a super strong connection to the meaning of it, but just because it’s one of the most misunderstood cards. It’s macabre and weird. And I really just love all the interpretations that different tarot decks give to it.
JP: Yeah, definitely.
Crys: Someone once drew fan art of Neil Gaman as The Hanged Man, and that’s been in my brain ever since.
JP: I can see that.
Crys: Right. Right. All right. So will you give us a description of The Hanged Man, JP?
JP: Yeah. So the keywords for upright are: pause, surrender, letting go, and new perspectives. And the reversed keywords are: delays, resistance, stalling, and indecision. So in general, The Hanged Man is a man suspended from a T-shaped cross made of living wood, I don’t know why it has to specify living wood. But he’s hanging upside down, and it’s actually that the noose is around his ankle. And he is basically viewing the world from a completely different perspective.
His face or his expression is generally calm and serene, and that suggests maybe he’s hanging from this position by choice. Sometimes there’s a halo around his head symbolizing new insight, awareness, and enlightenment. I really like this card because it makes me think of the story of Oden and how he hung from the tree of life and he learned things from a new perspective. And that’s very much what that this Hanged Man represents, is that surrender, being suspended in time, and just seeing the world through a new eye set of eyes.
Crys: Okay. So our craft question for The Hanged Man is: how do you deal with writer’s block? How do you deal with writer’s block, JP?
JP: In the terms of the definition of when I sit down and I am getting ready to write and no words come, which is what I would define as writer’s block, I have to approach it in multiple different ways. Sometimes I will just sit there and I’ll be like, words will come, just let it happen. And then something will come out and usually it’s garbage, and then eventually something happens.
Other times, I’ll get my face away from the computer screen and I will pace a room and I’ll process what is my problem. Like, why am I not able to write this scene? Is there something here? And I’ll go through everything. I’ll be like, okay, what’s this theme that I’m trying to say? What’s the point of this scene? And I’ll just start to verbalize where my blockage is because usually there’s something along the lines of, I don’t understand something yet. And so I need to understand what that process is.
Then I’ll sit down back at the computer and I will write out the most skeleton draft of that scene as I can. You know, character wakes up, character goes across room, character decides to jump out window, question mark. And then I’ll be like, why does the character do this? And then I’ll go through these different steps to just let me know this is how the story flows and then I can get back into workflow.
But that’s how I deal with it on a day-to-day basis. How do you deal with it?
Crys: Yeah, I have encountered two different kinds of writer’s block. The one is very much craft-based with two subcategories. One is, I don’t know what happens next, which is why I tend to be more of an outliner because then I can navigate that ahead of time, like I can mitigate that. But sometimes I will challenge myself to write into the dark and then I have to, very much like you said, start interrogating the text. What are the characters feeling? Why are they feeling this? How are they moving towards their needs? Yada, Yada, yada.
The other one is that something is missing previously that I need in order to move forward. And what I will generally do then is, I don’t use Scribner for almost anything other than this, for some reason I pull it up and my brain goes into chaos mode. But when I need it for this particular instance, I will take my entire work, I will put it in Scribner, parse it out into its scenes, and I will use the note card functionality to look at my outline and I will see what is missing.
And this happens to me, again, more while pantsing than while plotting. But it can happen to me while plotting. I’m like something’s off and need to justify where we are at now in the story before I can move forward. And I can find that I was missing like two scenes where conversations need to happen or emotions needed to progress before I felt like I was justified in being where I was in the story to get the next big change in relationship and status or whatever.
The other big category of thing that gives me writer’s block is external stress. It might be related to the writer business, but it’s not related to the craft. And that is so complicated because sometimes it’s burnout related. Sometimes it’s just immediate stress-related. Sometimes it’s like, I can’t write until I know that the clothes are drying on the line because I know I’m gonna forget. Sometimes it’s small stresses. Sometimes it’s big stresses.
The big stresses are the hardest to deal with. Sometimes I can’t make myself write, period, and it’s not the work’s fault. It is often a big old sign that I am pushing myself harder than I ought to. And that only comes after I have done the thing where I have been pushing myself to write, even though I’m in that stress mode. And I will make myself sit down and write, and I will do sprints, and I will force myself to do the work for a long period of time until I get to that point where I really just need to stop doing the work.
JP: I would say the same for me is like when you run into those days where you just cannot write, there is something that is in the way. I have had to go about it in a way that I accept the fact that I can’t write that day. And then I move on and I don’t fret about it. And that’s been something that’s been really helpful because there is energy that is consumed by the mere frustration that you have by not being able to do something.
So if I can’t write that day, I will have a moment where I’m like, ugh, I can’t write this day, this is really frustrating. But I will use that energy towards writing the next day. I will prepare myself to write the next day or the next day, or whenever I can get back to the page, instead of focusing on what I can’t do today.
I think that’s really important, especially when dealing with writer’s block, that any writer can’t write every single day. There is going to be something that is going to happen that is going to prevent you from writing that day. It’s just going to happen. And I think that the less energy you put towards that frustration and the more energy you put towards the next day or the next, it sets you up for a better outcome.
Crys: One of the ways that I recognize whether it’s me giving into resistance or truly me needing a break, is like have I consistently been making myself move past the negative feelings in the days previous to this and I’m still writing? If so, then this is not necessarily a resistance thing, it may be a ‘I need a break’ thing. It’s more likely to be an ‘I need a break’ thing.
It also generally means that I have been pushing myself closer to burnout, which is not ideal. I don’t want that to be my only metric for seeing is this me just like having resistance and having writer’s block and I just need to sit down and make myself write trash or, what I feel is trash. It rarely is, we’re terrible judges of our work, like how we feel when we write something has no indication of its quality.
So what I am trying to do in my writing life to catch that sooner, to not give into resistance because I’m like, oh, I don’t wanna get into burnout, but also to not get into burnout, is on the days when I feel like I can’t write or I’m just having a lot of trouble, I try to make myself write a very minimal amount just to push through the resistance, to not allow the resistance to win. And I’ll write a hundred words. I can do that. I’m like, okay, I have not given into the resistance, but I am also going to give myself the rest that I need.
If I do get to the point where I’m like, oh, it’s a rest thing and I’ve been pushing myself too hard, then I just let myself rest. And generally for me, by the time I get to that point, I need at least three days. Like it’s not just a one-day thing. I’m really bad at recognizing and I’m getting better, but I’m really bad at recognizing that it’s a day where I just need to write a hundred words and then let it go. So I generally push myself to the point where I then need three days of rest. But that’s my relationship with writer’s block.
JP: This conversation makes me think of the fact that if a nine-to-five day job can recognize that people need mental health days, then we need to recognize as writers, that even if this is something we enjoy doing and we love doing and we love being in control of our own time, we also need those days. We also need time away from the page to rejuvenate, to recollect ourselves. And I think that’s important to think about because do you really want that hustle culture or not? And I don’t.
Crys: I was gonna say very few US nine-to-five jobs recognize the need for mental health days.
JP: There’s that.
Crys: So while we were talking, I went and pulled out all my Hanged Man cards. And I’m really intrigued that two of them are bats because I knew that my Wild Unknown deck was, but I didn’t know that my Madame Clara was also a bat. The other one is this rad aerial silks lady.
JP: Nice.
Crys: Dear listeners, I’m very curious how you go about handling writer’s block. Is it something that you allow or acknowledge? Some people are like writer’s block doesn’t exist, it’s just not wanting to do something. And that’s fair if that works for you, but I do think it is a good term that covers a lot of things that make us resistant to writing. And it’s really important to figure out what is the actual cause because it’s not an entity of its own, in my opinion.
JP: Yeah, definitely let us know.
Crys: Now we are going to go on and record our business episode for this week inspired by The Hanged Man, which is how do you deal with burnout? And, oh boy, have we dealt with burnout.
If you would like access to that episode and all of our other business episodes inspired by the Major Arcana of tarot, you can come to our Patreon which is www.patreon.com/WriteAwayPodcast. We’d love to see you there.
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