This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 8: How To Write When You Just Don’t Feel Like Writing.

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Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion, and to write every day. I am your host, Sarah Werner, and I want to start off this week’s podcast by saying thank you to those of you who have sent me emails. They are lovely and encouraging, and they really keep me focused on why I’m doing this in the first place. So thank you so much for your encouragement and your kind words.

One of the emails I received was from, and my apologies, if I don’t pronounce your name correctly, Shifa Turkistani, who wanted me to share this inspirational writing quote with you: “From E. L. Doctorow: ‘Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing, and learn as you go.'” Shifa goes on to say, “It says what you always say, but in different words, and I think that that is what is great about writing. We might have the same idea, but everyone sees and expresses it in his own way.” And that is exactly the sort of message that I love to share with people, so thank you so much for sharing that with us.

If you would like to send me an email, you can do so in one of two ways. First, you could go to my website, sarahwerner.com, S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com. Go to the contact page, and fill out the little form there. Alternately, you can just send me a direct email at hello at sarahwerner dot com. Tell me how your own writing is going, tell me if there are any subjects you’d like me to address in the podcast, ask me questions, share your favorite quotes, et cetera. I would absolutely love to hear from you.

So today, I want to talk about how to make yourself write, even when you don’t feel like it. One of the main tenants of this podcast is to give you the inspiration, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day, emphasis on the write every day. And in fact, this podcast is called Write Now, so you can see, I feel strongly about this. But the other half of this podcast is about understanding that there is a very delicate work-life writing balance that must be adhered to, and I want to make sure that I respect your time, that you respect your own time, and spend the time you need with your family, at your job, at whatever other obligations you have.

I know that a lot of us have to make time to write, and that that is difficult. Whether you’re trying to squeeze in a couple of hours of writing before work, like my sister Rebecca does, or if you come home from work and you sit down at your desk after an eight, or nine, or 10, or 11 hour workday, and turn on your computer and realize exactly how exhausted you are, or even if you’re trying to squeeze in a little bit of writing over a lunch break, between classes, on a long train commute, or even hiding in the basement at your grandmother’s house, while the rest of your weird extended family hangs out upstairs and does their weird extended family things, I know that that’s your situation, and I know it’s hard.

When your alarm goes off at 4:30, five, five o’clock in the morning, and the very last thing you want to do is get out of your nice, warm bed, shuffle to your office and start writing. I know how that feels. And it’s just so easy, isn’t it, to turn off your alarm and roll over, and pull the covers over your head and to say, “Five more minutes,” and then to wake up just before you need to leave for work. And it’s just so easy when you’re over your lunch to go out with friends, or to take a walk, or to get some of your emails read. And it’s just so easy after a long workday, or a long day with the kids, or a long day of meetings and obligations, to sit down with a belly full of dinner in your little food coma, cradling your little food baby in your stomach, to sit down at your desk and commit to yet, more work, because as fun as it is, and as fun as it can be at times, writing is hard work.

And sometimes we get tired. Oh, I get so tired. I am very, very good, as I have said before, at over-committing myself. I’m so good at it. I’m so good at saying yes to everyone, and to no to myself, and no to my own writing. I hope that you are not like that as well. I hope that it’s easy for you to say no to people, and to say yes to yourself, and yes to writing. But on the off chance you are like me, today, we are going to work through a decision tree that I’ve created that will help you prioritize and get on the track to writing every day. So I don’t really offer any guarantees or any sort of money back promise, because this is a free podcast and you’re welcome to take or leave my advice as you see fit. But my hope is that with the information in today’s podcast, you will be well on your way to writing, and in fact, you will find yourself writing before you know it.

So that’s a bit of a lofty claim. Let’s go ahead and temper it. I’m going to temper it by saying that this will only work if you commit to doing it. This is not a silver bullet, this is not a magic wand that you can wave, and all of a sudden, your book will be finished. Perhaps obviously, but I still feel the need to insert a caveat here, so you will need to act on this. It starts off really easy. Number one, go into the place where you write, whether that’s your office, or a greenhouse, or the bedroom, or a park, or a closet in the basement of your grandmother’s house, an empty classroom, the break room at work, wherever it is that you write, go there and shut the door. I’ve talked about shutting the door before, and I will talk about it again, but I need you to be in a place where you can focus.

So the key here is to have as few distractions as possible, which is why step two, before you do anything else, before you turn on your computer, before you take out your notepad and your pencil, or pen, before you start staring at an empty screen or an empty page, what I want you to do is take a look at yourself. Not literally, not in a mirror or whatever, but what I want you to do is to honestly assess how you feel. Emphasis on the word honestly. This is hard. It is very, very, very difficult for us to be honest with ourselves, because when we are honest with ourselves, we see and expose things that we don’t want to see or expose, which means that we have to acknowledge and deal with these things.

And what I always do first, is weigh this decision: am I simply too tired to do this? Ask yourself, am I simply too tired, too exhausted, too bleary-eyed, too worn out to do this? Because if you are legitimately exhausted, I would not want you to overwork yourself, because that is possible, and I have done it before, and it has bad consequences. You might be tempted to say you are simply too tired, but this is where I want you to be honest with yourself. You’re going to be tired, waking up at 4:30 in the morning. You’re going to be tired sitting down at your desk after a full workday, after a day with the kids, but ask yourself, is it actual exhaustion? And if it is, which is completely legitimate, if you are like me and you have over-committed yourself to the point where you are physically hurting yourself, then you might be legitimately exhausted. In which case, this may not be your writing season yet.

But if you take an honest, hard, look at your tiredness, at your disinclination to write, and if you feel any tinge of guilt or regret when you think about not writing, if you suspect that you are capable of writing, but are perhaps feeling lazy, or disheartened, or any number of other things, then you do need to write. You need to write. I can’t say it enough times. You are a writer, and you were made to write. Karen Lamb is credited with the quote, “A year from now, you will wish you had started today,” And that is great medicine for those of us who are inclined to procrastinate, and to put off until tomorrow what can be done today. What I really want you to do is to preempt that feeling of regret that I know you’re familiar with, when yet another day has gone by and you have not written. I know that feeling, and it doesn’t feel good.

So the first decision in our decision tree, after you’ve entered your writing realm, shut the door, and taken your seat, is to assess your physical state, and your emotional state, and your mental state, and decide whether or not you are physically capable of writing today. If the answer is yes, if you make the decision, the conscious decision to write, you are already winning. Once you’ve made your decision, you can then either go to bed and sleep, or you can decide to continue on with the decision tree.

If you do not decide to sleep, your next step is to turn on your computer, take out your notebook, your pad of paper, your recording device, whatever it is you use to write, prepare that. However, if you write on a computer, do not turn on the internet, do not open up a browser. Put your phone in airplane mode or better yet, turn it off completely. Once you have your writing materials ready and in front of you, what I want you to do is create a new file, a new document if you’re on a computer. Take out a fresh sheet of paper, or better yet, find a notebook. It can be spiral-bound, it can be a nice Moleskine, whatever it is you have access to.

And this file, this document, this little notebook, title it journal, and make it as simple as you possibly can. Do not worry if you are typing this in a word processor, do not worry about formatting. Do not choose fonts, do not format, do not use bullets, do not consider indenting, or centering, or line spacing, that does not matter. What you’re doing, whether you’re typing in her handwriting it, is creating a document of freedom. You are creating a document where you can be honest with yourself, where you can face hard truths about yourself, and where you can be absolutely free to be yourself without judgment or censure.

So the next step, after you’ve established your journal, whatever that is, is to open it up to the first page, or to the next available page. Write the date at the top, and beneath that, I want you to start writing about why you don’t feel like writing today. Is it because you feel stupid? Do you feel inadequate? Do you feel lazy, or bored with your own work? Do you feel disheartened? Depressed? Too anxious to sit still? Preoccupied with kids, or bills, or social issues at work? Whatever it is, start writing about that. You don’t have to say, “Dear diary,” or anything like that. I just want you to start letting the words come out, and I want them to be true, because I believe that all good writing is based somehow on truth, and I want to give you a good start. So start writing and see what comes out. Let your typing and your writing be your thoughts, put into kinetic motion. Think hard, and be honest.

All right, whatever you end up writing down, this is your enemy for today. If it’s thoughts of despair and hopelessness, if it’s feelings of stupidity, preoccupation, distraction, whatever it is, this is the enemy that you are going to defeat today, and I know you’re going to defeat it today. I know this because you’ve already started. You are already writing. You don’t have a blank page or a blank screen in front of you anymore. You’ve started, and you’ve started on a basis of truth and honesty, and that is the best place you can start. You’ve started, which means that you’ve already begun to gain momentum, and this is important for continuing.

All right, the next step, glance over what you’ve written. Do not spend a long time looking at this. Do not edit, do not do anything to this. Simply look it over, and get an understanding of where you are coming from. Do not be tempted to sit and stare at what you’ve written. This is not your accomplishment for today, this is simply a step toward writing when you don’t feel like writing. So what I need you to do next, once you understand where your mind is, is to take an action. Now, this action can be one of a couple of different things. So this is the next branch in our decision tree. You can simply continue writing in your journal, because honestly, at the end of the day, unless you have a super strict deadline with whatever project you’re working on, writing is writing. It is all good for you. No matter what you are writing, you’re developing yourself as a writer, and you’re doing something good.

So if today is just one of those days where you need to write for yourself in your journal, and you need to fill up seven, or 10, or 12 pages with crap about how you’re feeling, then do that. However, if you feel like you’ve kind of already dumped out what you’re feeling at this point, then you can go ahead and move into your work, whether that’s transitioning into your story, whether that is making it a small outline for what you want to accomplish today, and then writing, use the momentum you’ve already built up in your journal to continue writing your poetry, your short story, your novel, what have you.

However, if you are still not feeling it, if you feel like you need to somehow resolve what it is you’ve discovered about yourself and your current state within your journal, you can go ahead and do that. And so, what you need to do is find an appropriate solution to the problem. So for example, if you realize that today you’re feeling particularly stupid or inadequate, let me just tell you, you are not stupid, and you are not inadequate. You are a writer, you are an intelligent person. You have a story to tell that someone, somewhere will want to read, and will derive meaning from what you’ve written.

If you realize that you are simply feeling lazy, if you would rather play video games, or watch Netflix, you need to realize that this is the place you are truly free to have your adventure, to be what you want to be. You are a writer, this is your playground. This is where you can be creative and be yourself, and remake the world in whatever shape you see fit. If you realize you’re bored with your own work, that is probably not a great sign, and what I would suggest you do is start working on something new, or continue in your existing work, and challenge yourself to surprise yourself. I have a podcast about how to surprise yourself in your writing. It’s episode number four, and it’s called Go On, Surprise Yourself, and I would advise you to listen to it if you haven’t done so already.

If you find that you are feeling disheartened, I want to tell you that I believe in you. You are brave, even if that little seed of bravery is buried deep within the depths of your heart, I know it’s there. And if that’s not enough, then I advise you to message or call someone who can tell you how awesome you are, who can remind you that you are smart, and you have a great story to tell. If you find you are too anxious to sit, still do some jumping jacks, do some sit ups, do what you feel comfortable doing to level out your anxiety, or to become less restless, and to move into a state where you are ready to write. So whatever it is, and I don’t mean this to be as harsh as it sounds, but whatever it is, deal with it. Take action, and deal with it. And if you need to at any point, go back to your journal, process how you’re feeling, and move back into your creative work.

That was my list of do, now here is my list of do not. If everything on my do list was active, everything on my do not list, is passive. If you find that you don’t feel like writing, the two options in the decision tree I outlined earlier were either go to sleep because you’re exhausted, or find a way to make yourself write. You will notice that I did not advise that you turn on the TV. I do not advise you to watch a movie, even though it’s totally easy to justify doing that. I’ve in fact, have done that before. I’m like, “Oh, I just need to watch 10 more episodes of Alias, because the mother daughter-relationship is really interesting, and I just need to get inspired.” No, I was being lazy, and I wanted to watch Alias because it is addictive, and well-written, and awesome, but all I did was waste my time watching Alias, and not writing.

Do not play video games, if that is a temptation for you. If you want to dive into Mass Effect and see how your space friends are doing, don’t do it. Nothing good will come of that. It will not inspire you. Do not lay down to read. You can read to inspire yourself, if that’s something that helps, if that’s something that inspires you, you can read, but do not lay down to read, or you will fall asleep.

So you can see from this list, these are all passive activities, watching TV, watching movies, playing video games. And I’m certainly a proponent of brain activity with smart video games, and smart TV shows, smart movies, but at the end of the day, what you’re doing is consuming, and not creating. I don’t want you to consume and pass it off as getting inspiration, as much as I’ve done that myself before, I know. I want you to create and to be active, and to not consume and to be passive.

One other thing I want to address, and I’ve tried this method myself and I’ve seen other people using it, is if you don’t feel like writing, there is kind of this reward system that you can use. And I don’t know how I feel about this, because it may work every once in a while, but it doesn’t work consistently, at least not for me. So the way this works is you say, “Okay, I’ll write for 20 minutes, and then I can have some candy,” or “I’ll write three pages, and then I can take my lunch break,” or “I’ll write 700 words, and then I’ll watch 10 episodes of Alias.” Okay, obviously that one is a bad idea, and you will not start writing again after doing that.

But for me, the reward system is fickle, and it’s fickle for two reasons. First, because it’s very easy to dull yourself to the reward. The first couple days, the candy might seem awesome and you’re like, “Oh, this is great. I wrote this amount, and now I can have all this candy. This is pretty great,” but it doesn’t last. You get used to the candy, or whatever it is that you’re using to reward yourself. The reward system also establishes a sort of… I’m not really sure how I want to put this. There’s a false basis for your writing. And earlier I said with the journaling aspect, all the best writing comes from honesty and truth.

I feel like writing for a reward system is writing that’s based on a lie. And I know that sounds extravagant, and I know that sounds a little strong, but you’re not writing because you want to write. At that point, you’re not writing because you’re passionate about telling a story, you’re writing to get it over with. You’re writing to hurry up and get your candy. You’re not writing for the reasons that you should be writing. Now, that’s not to say that you can’t do this occasionally, I just don’t want this to become a daily habit for you, because I’ve tried doing that, and it’s not sustainable.

Finally, one more thing about the journal, whether you decide to do this electronically or on paper, there are some kind of additional benefits to starting every writing day with an introspective blurb. Number one, if you do this consistently, you might start to notice trends in your own behavior and your own mindset, that can give you valuable insight as to when, and where, and how you should be writing. If you notice you always feel disheartened after a night of very little sleep, then maybe you should be getting more sleep. Or if you notice that you are feeling noticeably stupid after interactions with a certain person, then that can also be very telling.

Number two. I don’t know if you will find this to be as true as I have, but I find that I write much better when I am journaling, and I don’t know if it is because I’m sort of dumping out all the emotional baggage into its own little packaged form, and then saving my true creative writing for my creative writing, or if it really is simply just always having something to begin with that’s true, that’s your own, and then using the momentum from that to carry over into my other work. So again, I’m not really sure why, but I do tend to write better creatively when I am also journaling on the side.

Part of the reason that I chose this topic for this week, is because it is perhaps conveniently, something that I am struggling with a lot lately, especially discerning whether I am actually exhausted, or whether I am simply being lazy. So this is a method that I have come up with for myself and it’s been working, which is really good. I am in this weird place right now, where pretty much every day, I have a pre-work meeting of some sort that begins at 6:30 or seven. I go to work from eight to noon. I have a lunch commitment, whether it’s a meeting, or a lunch day with a friend, from noon to one, then I go back to work until five or 5:30. And then I go to meetings of some kind, whether it’s for church or for a board that I’m on, or some other organization, and then often that lasts for a couple of hours, and then either I go home and make a late dinner, or I go on to the next meeting.

And then finally, when I get home, I fall down, and my husband reminds me that I need to stop saying yes to so many things. So yes, it’s been hard for me to find time to write lately, and I’m actually kind of embarrassed about that. So I just want you to know that I am right here with you once again, struggling to fulfill this dream I have, but it’s more than that, struggling to become the person that I believe I was meant to become. So let me know, whether it’s through an email, or a message on Twitter, or what have you, let me know how you fit writing time into your day, because I am very interested to know how you make that happen.

This week, I read a really delightful young adult fantasy novel. It’s called Seraphina, and it’s written by Rachel Hartman. It was simply lovely. It’s a book written from a 16 year old girl’s point of view, and she lives in what appears to be sort of late Georgian, pseudo England, but it’s a very unique world, and it has characters who change and grow, at a very well-thought out pace. And it has a very nice little love story, but most of all, it has a strong and believable heroine, who is believable because she is not strong in the way that a lot of movies portray women as strong, which is to say, overcompensating, and having the biggest guns, and screaming the loudest when they kill the hardest. That’s not a strong female character.

This is a strong female character who is not afraid to be herself. She takes control of her situation and who she is, and all of her faults and shortcomings, and stays true to her ideals and beliefs, and stands up to things that should be stood up against. I don’t want to spoil the book for you. This is the kind of fantasy novel that does have dragons in it, which is not a spoiler, because there is a dragon on the cover. But once again, if you have any patience or tolerance for young adult fantasy, or even if you don’t, I would certainly recommend that you give this very short and sweet book a read. Again, if you would like to follow my reading adventures, they are on the internet for the world to see. I have a profile on Goodreads, which I will link to in today’s show notes.

Thank you for joining me for the Write Now podcast, episode eight: How to Write When You Just Don’t Feel Like Writing. Remember the decision tree: decide to enter your writing space, to shut the door, to sit down, to assess why it is you don’t feel like writing, to process those thoughts by writing them down, by either continuing to write on your writing project, or by solving those problems so that you can continue to write that day. And by using that journal going forward, is a sort of strategic tool in your writer’s toolbox. And remember, when you don’t feel like writing, do not be tempted to watch TV or movies, or play video games, or take a nap. Those are not helpful. Those are passive, and not active.

I want to give special thanks today to official rad dude, Sean Locke, who is one of my very wonderful contributors on Patreon. I host the Write Now podcast on my own time and on my own time, but if you would like to help me continue to produce this podcast, then you can do so using Patreon, which I will link to in today’s show notes on my website, sarahwerner.com. You can also just go to the website, and click on the contribute link in the header. Patreon is a third-party, secure donation platform that allows patrons of the arts to support the artist whose work means a lot to them. So if you would like to do that, if you find yourself moved to do that, I would be greatly appreciative, but no pressure.

Also, I would like to encourage you to sign up for my email mailing list. You can do that on my website, sarahwerner.com, in a number of different places. There’s a link on the contact page, and there’s a little pop-up box that comes up if you scroll all the way down to the bottom of any page. Simply type in your email address, and I will send you exciting emails on a semi-irregular basis. It’s kind of fun, and it’s another way that I can connect with you throughout the week between podcasts. Speaking of connecting with you throughout the week between podcasts, the Write Now podcast is now on Facebook. Yay! So if that’s your thing, and it’s okay if it’s not, just look for the Write Now podcast on Facebook. There will be a link to that in the show notes as well. So if you’d like to be part of that community, I invite you to do so.

And until next time, this has been episode eight of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion, and to write every day. I’m Sarah Werner, and I just really think the world of you.

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