Finding Joy in the Creative Darkness: Reflections on Writing and Stuckness

The vision I have presented in recent posts about the trouble of writing is a fundamentally positive one. This is a fertile space if we relate to it in an open and confident way. It is only by attuning ourselves to the feelings we encounter in it, the sense of an incipient idea even when we remain unable to fully identify it, that we can move through it. The joy of writing comes when we have something to say, while avoiding the temptation to fixate on outputs and/or squeeze too much out of the inspiration we experience at a particular moment.

The problem comes when we find ourselves stuck in that creative darkness, either at a particular moment or in a sustained way. My experience of the former has been that simply accepting nothing is coming, going off to do something as far away from writing as the practicalities of the day permit, can be the best antidote to that stuckness becoming a chronic matter. The only time I’ve ever found myself chronically stuck was during a period of immense personal upheaval where I simply couldn’t write for months. There was so much that I was struggling to process personally that the subterranean work described by Bertrand Russell had simply ceased for the foreseeable future. I tried to sit down and write but it only intensified my distress about everything that was going on in my life. Eventually I accepted that I wasn’t going to be able to write in any meaningful sense, so dropped the expectation that I would and instead focused on getting myself through a difficult situation with as much care and self-concern as I could muster under the circumstances.

This experience of chronic stuckness was in this sense not unlike my experience of situational stuckness. I just had to give up writing for the season rather than the day. It was striking that when I resolved the situation, eventually taking the action that freed me from a state of interpersonal limbo, I immediately regained the impulse to write. It felt as if a tap had suddenly turned back on in my mind, leading me to write thousands of words over the next few days with an intensity that had eluded me for months, if not years. In fact it was a source of immense comfort over the subsequent months as I negotiated the fallout of my decision. It left me with a vivid appreciation of how writing can be a refuge, a reliable place of meaning and security which you can cultivate and return to.

It was newly clear how intricately the enjoyment of writing, the experience of flow and the feelings associated with it, came to be tangled up in my broader experience of the world. Not in the sense of enjoying writing when life was good and struggling with it when life was bad. It went much deeper than that, suggesting to me the flow of writing (or its absence) was tied to a mode of engagement with the world. Even if the circumstances were immensely challenging, they would still be conducive to writing if I approached them from a position of agency. That’s what freed me from being stuck in creative darkness: a decision about my future I made myself rather than waiting for someone else to make it for me. My experience is that if I approach life in this way, I will have something to say. It might not be insightful, interesting or creative. But to the extent I am genuinely engaging with my circumstances, I will have something to say.

The reason I’m sharing this is not to position my own writing practice as typical or even interesting. It’s to illustrate what reflection on the writing process can look like, if you see your practice as located within the psychic and social conditions of your life more widely. My suggestion is there’s a practical value in cultivating this reflection in order to better understand the psychological drivers of your writing. What need is it serving? What are you trying to prove? When do you experience it as working? When have you found it a punishing ordeal?

If you approach your writing as a narrowly technical exercise in which you either produce a certain outcome (or fail to) then you’re unlikely to consider this deeper layer of motivation. If you don’t understand these deeper forces driving your writing, an understanding that will remain partial and fallible by its nature, you will experience your enjoyment of writing as a mystery over which you can exercise little influence. It will be a creative flow you sometimes gratefully receive and which at other times evades you but which you fundamentally exercise little to no influence over.

I’m suggesting that in contrast it’s possible to develop a reflective orientation to your writing which can support your efforts to nourish the conditions in which ideas will consistently flow and you’ll regularly have something to say. I’ve drawn on my experience throughout to illustrate what that looks like in my own writing practice, which continues to develop and evolve as I do. The point is not that you should replicate what I’m doing, though I hope some of what I’ve shared will be useful as tips and techniques to experiment with. The reason I’ve offered this account is instead to support you in developing your own reflective approach to writing in order to better understand the relationship between your life circumstances, your psychological state, and your creative output.

#academicWriting #block #psychoanalysis #stuckness #writing

The lure of machine writing and the value of getting stuck

Once you have learned to work effectively with conversational agents, there is no situation which you encounter as a writer in which you couldn’t draw on them for practical support. To the extent you are writing because you enjoy it, at least some of the time, this need not be a problem. After all why would you outsource a task which brings you satisfaction? The problem arises when you find yourself stuck, as all writers inevitably will be from time to time: unsure of the next step, unable to move forward, frustrated by your lack of progress. There are certainly chronic forms of stuckness which need to be addressed as persistent conditions susceptible to structured intervention. For example if you are often unable to start a draft because of the anxiety the blank page provokes in you, it would obviously be beneficial to overcome that predicament through the use of machine writing to produce a ‘zero draft’ i.e. recording your existing ideas and turning them into a extremely rough initial text in order to get you through that previously insurmountable initial stage.

What about forms of stuckness which aren’t chronic? What Montaigne described as the “creative confusion” which sometimes afflicts a writer, caught in a wearying oscillation between intoxication with a sense of one’s own genius and a revulsion at the banality of one’s own words? What about the predicament Boice describes where “obsessiveness and excessive self-reflection” about a long-term project “can even make a manuscript seem foreign, like someone else’s writing, or else so overly familiar that it becomes embarrassing”? What about when you suddenly discern a weakness in your argument and intuit that pulling at this newly visible thread will lead the whole edifice to come crashing down around you? If these are persistent features of the writing process, if they more or less prevent writing as a sustained and enjoyable activity, they should be reasons for seeking advice, support and transformation. This is where the capacities of AI writing tools could prove to be invaluable.

The concern I increasingly feel about machine writing is that these often aren’t persistent but rather temporary features of the writing process. Being stuck is a routine and unavoidable experience of writing which even the most outwardly successful academic writer will regularly experience. The social theorist Margaret Archer once said to me that “if you start a book and don’t feel like you are drowning then it’s not worth doing”. It was reassuring to hear that these complex theoretical monographs, repeated at regular intervals over decades, did not emerge fully formed but rather had to be worked at and struggled over.

It’s not simply that being stuck is an unavoidable feature of writing, as much as that it’s also a formative feature of writing. Through being stuck we change and grow as writers, we define what matters to us and we can transcend the limitations we have brought into a project. The things which lead us to get stuck are not immutable facts about our psychology as writers, nor are they set in stone. We can leave these challenges behind, even while recognizing that we will inevitably meet other challenges in the future that lead us to get stuck again, in new and frustrating ways.

The problem is that if we don’t struggle with our stuckness, if we see it as a problem to be solved as quickly and efficiently as possible, we lose out on the growth which might otherwise have come about. There is a balance to be struck here in which we avoid moralizing stuckness, not least of all because imbuing it with such significance carries the risk of tipping us over into the chronic forms of stuckness we have discussed. But if we see it as something which ought to be avoided to the greatest extent possible, we are likely to lose something, subtle though significant, which diminishes us as writers.

#academicWriting #creativity #generativeAI #RobertBoice #scholarship #stuckness #writing

[Long Read] Who’s Afraid of #JudithButler?
The #philosopher and #gender #theorist has been #denounced, #demonized, even #burnedineffigy. They have a #theory about that.

For their latest work, Butler became a #student again, wading into a #world #ruled by enveloping #dread. “I just tried to go deeper into that place of enormous #stuckness and #rage,” they said.

#Women #Transgender #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA #Feminism #RoleModels #Representation #Culture

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/05/06/judith-butler-profile