when we give up on writing

It’s 1am. You are exhausted beyond words, but it isn’t just the late hour. Staring at your manuscript, at the blank page in front of you, you realise that you don’t want to write another word. You don’t want to even look at this manuscript. This white rectangle. That damn flickering.

You know this isn’t a one-off. This has been your day in and day out. You’ve given up writing and just haven’t accepted it yet. Which sucks, because you love writing. Or at least, you did. It’s like a relationship when the flame goes out. You’ve been there, but not present.

Every great writer has been there. A lot of roads lead to it, a lonely citadel that builds more and more walls until you cannot leave, and this makes us think that we can take it down brick-by-brick. We are sold the right app, the right course, the right idea. Each of them is a brick taken from the fortress we built, but the fortress is far too vast for that.

The issue, I think, is that we dread being there. Staring at the manuscript, boxed in by too many thoughts and feelings and none of them good. That alone adds to the dread.

It is a paradox. We want to write, but it is writing that terrifies us. What we sometimes miss is that writing is far more than the activity, and the fortress we build around it consists of many more rooms than the action. If we want to understand our writing, we have to understand every part of it. 

Part of it, a room we never want to present to the world, is that sometimes, we just don’t need to write.  We don’t need to write. When we hold in so much to it, filling ourselves with dread and shame, we do it no service.

Because, often, it is not the action that is the problem. It might be something in our personal life. It might be that writing means something different to us now and we need to come to terms with it. It might be that writing has become a great big monster, and we need time away, and perspective, to see what it has become.

It is not a satisfying answer. It is not one that benefits the likes of writing coaches like me, or editors, or influencers. But if I am truthful, sometimes a break, as heartbreaking as it might be, is what we need the most.

We need to see our writing for what it is. Not what we want it to be, nor what we fear it is. Sometimes, we just need time away, until that thing we love calls us home.