Motivation

Creative work is a funny thing. Sometimes, no matter how determined you are to sit down and get something on the page, it just... isn't happening.

"Writer's block" is in some ways a nice concrete term for this experience, but it can feel like a dismissal or an oversimplification when you're the one staring down a blank page. Or not even a blank page! Sometimes the worst is rereading a draft and knowing it needs work, and possibly even knowing what specifically it needs, and just not being able to make it happen.

That's more or less how I've been feeling about writing this post. My head is full of ideas of what I'd like to talk about... but every time I try to write one of them, I've got nothing to say. And I'm tired of having nothing to say. So, let's talk about that.

In the world of STEM academia where I spend my days, creativity and aha moments and the sparks of ideas that send you scrambling to jot down every last thought before it escapes are, maybe unsurprisingly, not talked about. "Writer's block," in its broadest sense (applied not just to writing-related tasks) is generally known as "procrastination" or "you need to get your act together and finish grad school." (Thank you, Physics Man! So helpful! All better now!) But the ebb and flow of motivation, productivity, or whatever you want to call it is still very real.

The difference is that, at least in my lab, you can always find a mindless task that still counts, more or less, as progress. If my brain is trying to shut down, there's always plumbing, or soldering, or repairing cables, or even just cleaning up the random items that inevitably collect on every horizontal surface (or taking a really easy set of data that requires so little mental bandwidth I'm literally writing this as I do it... whoops, don't tell my advisor).

Writing, at least that I've found, doesn't have those "easy side jobs." So it's easy to feel like more of a failure on the creative task, where progress is OBVIOUSLY zero, even though the useful progress is about the same. Also, the guilt piles up, because writing is supposed to be fun. (And easy! And if you love what you do, it never feels like work! Something must be wrong!)

... Which is just not true. It's taken me a while to accept, but anything worth doing is really, really hard sometimes. And really, really boring sometimes. And really, really frustrating sometimes.

For instance: my partner and I play music together (he plays guitar, I play bass) and we joke about how cool it would be to be in Metallica (my partner's the metalhead; feel free to be like me and mentally substitute Green Day)... until you realize how many times they've practiced the exact same songs over and over and over and over again, and how many times they've probably been stuck on writing new ones. I'm sure it's still amazing! But there's no way it's Fun At All Times the way we like to convince ourselves the perfect, creative dream job should be.

I try to make myself remember that when I'm stuck and writing is just not happening. Emphasis on try, because it's hard. Especially when you're in the process of taking a leap of faith into could-this-be-my-job territory.

Finishing Fireflies and Zeroes was exciting, but it was also sort of terrifying. My disaster children, as I lovingly refer to my protagonists (whom you'll meet soon! I'm so excited to introduce them!) have been running circles in my head for the better part of a decade, and the characters in the YA project that I'm just now sending off to beta readers have been there for even longer. With both long-term projects in various stages of being "done," all of my fictional people were suddenly just... all set.

This void was not the happy feeling of accomplishment I'd been hoping for. Instead, it felt like I was staring into the most enormous, overwhelming, blank page of my life, watching that infuriating little text cursor blink on and off forever.

So, I did what anyone would do, and panicked.

And listened to MCR's Danger Days on repeat.

And started teaching myself to handstand walk.

And panicked some more.

And kept listening to Danger Days on repeat.

And, eventually had An Idea. One that kept me up for three nights straight. One that I'm still frantically writing and obsessing over and believe is my Best Idea Ever (don't hold me to that).

So, I guess, out of all that, my point is this. Creative brains are weird, and can feel irreparably broken and out of ideas way, way more often than is appropriate. But they also can get themselves through those times, usually through mechanisms that make very little sense to an outside observer.

Writing this post didn't take the sort of effort that starting my next book did. (My third novel? Am I allowed to call it that?) But it did involve listening to All Time Low's Don't Panic on repeat grappling with some of the same motivation/creativity demons that never stay quiet for long. Maybe music calms the demons? That might be the lesson here. I should be a good scientist and go find out.