Hanging onto a side hustle like writing feels like a bloody street fight.
Scratch that. Hanging on to anything you care about feels like a bloody street fight.
In writing, it’s called writer’s block. In a relationship, it’s called the doghouse. At work, it’s called the 4th quarter. While running a marathon, it’s mile 23.
I got writer’s block last month. My day job entered its “busy season,” and my car decided to break down somewhere in the middle of all that.
With my mind cluttered, nothing I wrote was clever.
The first step to overcoming writer’s block is accepting that you will not be good every day. Not every episode of Seinfeld was good, and Taylor Swift has written forgettable songs.
The important thing is your response.
How should you respond?
Lean on the fundamentals. As John Wooden wrote,
“I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might be commonly overlooked. They may seem trivial, perhaps even laughable to those who don’t understand, but they aren’t.”
Here are the fundamentals I lean on whenever I hit a slump.
1.) Work In The Morning
In Ryan Holiday’s new book “Discipline is Destiny” he quotes the novelist Toni Morrison.
“Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make contact. Where they become the conduit or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal. It’s not being in the light, it’s being before it arrives.”
Toni Morrison was one of the greatest writers of her time. She wrote ten novels, five children’s books, and two plays, and her body of work won her the Presidential Medal and a Nobel Prize.
And it wasn’t like she had all day to write this stuff. At the beginning of her career, Toni worked a 9–5 at a publishing house while raising two boys as a single mother.
How did she do it? She worked before sunrise.
Before traffic cluttered the New York streets. Before her kids beckoned her attention. Before the pointless team meetings at work.
Light triggered her transition. Not being in the light, but “being before the light arrives.”
If you’re in a slump, win back your morning routine. Run, workout, read, write. Do something that gives you focus and energy.
Your friends will wake up at 7:30 am and scroll Instagram till 8 am. And you? Where will you be?
My Routine: I write for about 2 hours before clocking into work.
2.) I Carve Out Time For Reading
For writers, it’s impossible to be good without reading a lot.
I believe that holds true for anything big and important you’re trying to accomplish. All great producers were once great consumers.
Warren Buffett spends 80% of his day reading. Lin Manuel Miranda got the idea for Hamilton from reading a biography while on vacation. JFK read “The Guns of August” just before the Cuban Missile Crisis — a book about overconfident, battle-hungry world leaders during World War I.
We praise people who make “gut” decisions that they possess the “clutch” gene or something. There’s no clutch gene. Their power doesn’t come from god. It comes from experience, practice, and reading about their subject.
My Routine: I read for about 1 hour each morning before I write. It helps clear my head of leftover anxieties and fill my cup full of new ideas.
3.) Tidy Up My Apartment
My best friend and chef first introduced me to the term “mise en place.”Or “mise” if you’re tight with the restaurant industry.
It’s French slang, but to our ears, it simply means “everything in its place.”
Any professional restaurant you visit, anywhere in the world, mise en place is rule number one. And for good reason. Kitchens are chaos. If a pot is in the wrong location, if an ingredient gets to the chef a few seconds late, or if the knives aren’t cleaned, the whole ecosystem unravels like the butterfly that erupted Mount Vesuvius.
Everyone has their mise, but people rarely take the same care of their spaces as a chef does. Just think about all the useless apps clogging up your cell phone right now.
A cluttered space equals a cluttered mind.
If you’re in a slump, manage your mise. Clean your room, organize the folders on your desktop, and put away the dishes.
My Routine: It’s simple, I can’t go to bed if dishes are not put away, and I always make my bed in the morning.
Closing
Super simple habits, right?
That’s the point. A slump like writer’s block means we have to work backward to rebuild confidence, and the best way to build confidence is by doing the little things right. The things that don’t require much skill but are equally important.
First things first.
Curious about what you read before writing? Is it books? Articles? Newsletters? Or a mix and match of everything? Do you choose upfront what to read? Is it fiction/non-fiction?
I always start straight with the writing, but curious to see if it would spark more creativity reading before writing. My reading starts in the afternoon/evening.
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