My Creative Rut and Other Things You May Not Care About.
I have heard it said that writing, or any creative endeavor really, comes in seasons. That even when you aren’t creating, you are still soaking up the world in one way or another, pulling inspiration from the things you’re watching, reading, listening to, or otherwise observing in your daily life. Over the last year or so, I’ve been questioning what it means to be in a creative rut and what can actually be learned from those seasons when the words just aren’t coming.
I can pinpoint the start of rut to last summer and the very real burnout I felt from submitting a 100 page thesis of writing that quite literally tore me open—as memoir writing can often do. I couldn’t look at my manuscript for months, even after I promised myself I would use the summer to get it into a workable first draft of a manuscript. I barely opened the file on my computer, and when I did the words blurred together, or sounded like something somebody else had written. I couldn’t find a way to reconnect with the project I had been so desperate to get out of me.
Then, perhaps as a distraction, I started thinking up a reading series—something that could keep me tethered to the community I was desperate not to lose. Something that was writing adjacent—an important part of writing that didn’t require actual writing. So I threw myself into the logistics of creating Must Love Memoir, wanting to redirect my attention to things I knew without a doubt I was good at—organizing, obsessing about details, overthinking, and especially avoiding the “hard” parts of writing. I told myself the manuscript could wait…at least until I got through the first event.
Then I remembered that getting in front of a room of people with the intention of saying anything intelligent causes my stomach to do summersaults. I spent the entire summer trying to find a way to be comfortable as the host of a series people kept miraculously showing up to, losing hours untying the knots in my stomach and avoiding my mess of a potential manuscript even more. The writing rut had begun to grow legs and form a sturdy foundation.
A few months into Must Love Memoir, I decided to add my name to the list of monthly readers, attempting to force myself to look at my writing again. I was optimistic that the newly imposed deadlines would force me back into a creative space, much like my graduate writing workshops had. While I have managed to tidy up some old writing in the face of this new monthly deadline, it still feels like I’m pulling teeth to get anything new down on a page.
After 10 months of dancing around the edges of creativity, I finally had to admit that I was in a full blown writing rut and it got me thinking about those seasons people say creativity lives in. With regular seasons, you know there’s an ending. Winter will burn off at some point—even if it is hanging around in New York City much longer than it needs to right now. Spring will still spring, and summer will still summer, and you can more or less rely on when it will happen. But what happens when you don’t see that same ending for a creative rut and the current season you’re in spans an entire year?
I had an epiphany the other day, the first one in awhile if I’m being honest. Last Tuesday night, I was invited to A New York Evening With Tyler Hubbard at an intimate venue in Williamsburg. For my non-country music lovers out there, Tyler Hubbard is one half of the very popular, former country duo Florida Georgia Line. I was never a huge fan of the duo, even though “Cruise” can be stuck in my head for days if I even just think of the song. I had not heard Tyler Hubbard’s solo stuff, but it had been a long time since I listened to live country music, and I was looking forward to it.
Tyler Hubbard sang a handful of songs, none of which I had ever heard before. I stood amongst the crowd, listening to the songs, and being fully present in the moment—which can often be difficult for my overactive brain to do. It didn’t take long until I felt my throat expand with emotions that appeared out of nowhere—feelings that had been looking for an outlet over the last year that were finally making their way to the surface. I found myself standing and swaying along with the audience and let the music fill me up with something I didn’t know was missing.
The next morning, I found Tyler on Apple Music and hit shuffle, listening to as many songs as I could on my short commute to work. Things started to shift. What I can only imagine as loose cables between my brain and my emotions reconnected, and I started thinking as a writer again. Started thinking in terms of questions I was desperate to find an answer to—the kind of answer you can only arrive to through the act of writing. An idea for an essay came to me almost immediately.
That’s when I realized the thing I was missing in my writing practice was music. I used to be a person who went to concerts all the time, especially country concerts. I have always been incredibly moved by live music and particularly the emotions in country lyrics. Over the last few years, as I started taking my writing practice more and more seriously, my music listening was replaced with books and podcasts about writing. Without even realizing it, I had stopped carving out the time to listen to music.
I do believe fully in the knowledge that to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader. You need to read often and widely. I’m not suggesting that by reading so much I was looking in the wrong places for inspiration, but that I was simply not looking in the right places at the right time. I had been so fully committed to the illusion of what it means to be a “good writer” that I accidentally left a major part of my creative inspiration behind.
The next time I sat down to write, I felt like words just wanted to pour out of me, and I can draw a direct line from that feeling to my evening out with Tyler Hubbard. I’ve been listening to music every day since, putting my current Audiobook on pause for the time being and I find my motivation has rekindled just enough to remind myself how much writing is what I want to be doing. I don’t know how long this current season will last, but I know the Audiobook will be there when I need to get back to it. In the meantime, I’ll be playing favorite old albums on shuffle and taking long walks in Central Park.