Fill The Empty Cup

The cool thing about writing is a flexible schedule. You don't have to write at a particular time each day (although I encourage it), and you don't have to write every day (although I strongly encourage it). I'm always shouting “write, write, write,” and “anything that is not writing is bad.”

But sometimes you have to stop. Take a step back. Recharge. Do other things for a day or two (or three, as I have been doing since my last post) and come back to the page refreshed, ready to start again.

All of my novels started with an idea, followed by a 25-page burst of inspiration, followed by about three weeks of scribbling, a page or two here, more notes, another page there, before starting the actual scheduled write-every-day routine I get into when working on a long project.

My schedule changes from book to book. The page count, while fairly consistent, does have a wide margin of variation; my personal best for a day's writing is 13,000 words, while my worst is 200. I usually land right around 1500.

But there are those days where I sit down, stare at yesterday's work, and think, “this is not happening today.” And I go do something else. Read, watch a movie, play my guitar, go for a walk, play computer games. Anything but write.

Last night I sat down to work, read through some email, took a look at the website stats for the day, and then set to writing a post. Nothing happened. After about five minutes I realized nothing was going to happen. I dug through my old movies and watched Poltergeist. I hadn't seen the film in years, and this was the first time I'd watched it since my daughter was born. It took on a whole new life for me. I got out my notebook and started sketching out ideas for a new story (novel? Screenplay?) about a man whose daughter disappears. Very generic stuff for now, but the seed is planted. It may germinate.

That's filling the empty cup. The whole time you're doing other things, you're still writing. My head is working through whatever problem I grappled with when I decided it was not time to put words on paper. Time is often all that's needed.

Skipping a session is not the end of the world, the kiss of death, a criminal act or a cardinal sin. But you have to trust yourself. You have to know yourself well enough to know when it's really time to recharge and when you're just being lazy. That's tough. It takes discipline to plow through the bull, shut up that whiny voice that just wants to do crossword puzzles in bed all day and get back to it. Discipline and honesty.

Funnily enough, both of those qualities are also requirements for writing decent prose.

Take breaks to fill the empty cup. When the cup's full again, get off your butt and get back to work. Simple!

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