First Sunday Q&A: How I Navigated the Creative Slog
Q: I’m probably not the first writer who feels stuck. But I just got my manuscript back from my wonderful writer’s group and the amount of feedback was overwhelming. All good, they are fantastic readers, but I can’t think through the comments and I have no idea how to begin to use them. It feels like I’m in a swamp of uncertainty now, which makes me feel like a bad person after all their hard work and generosity. In a class, you once called it the creative slog.
What do you do when you’re in this kind of slump, when you don’t know how to move forward? How do you navigate the creative slog?
A: A determining factor between writers who actually finish a book—and possibly get it published—and those who don’t is tolerance with this slog.
For me, the slog arrives at fairly predictable moments:
After I download the first, enthusiastic creation of my idea and I’m faced with the reality of making it sing for someone else.
As I read my completed rough draft and see its ineptitude prior to revision.
When I’ve gotten useful feedback but am stunned at the amount of work the changes will take, like you shared above.
When I realize I need considerable new skills to revise to my taste.
During the long wait for responses (from agent or editor or anyone else who holds authority in the publishing world).
Writing teacher Jacqui Banaszynski summed it up beautifully: “The humility of being this stuck will fade once I’ve finished and back in blissful editing mode. The lessons I’ve had to learn again will also fade with time, but for now, they blink like neon.” (Nieman Storyboard)
That neon blink is hard to ignore, isn’t it. It can shape your entire belief in yourself as a writer. It enables the push.
How do you traverse it?
I love how author Stephen Aryan describes it. This “effort to keep going and press on no matter how tired or fed up you are with the book,” he writes. “No matter how much you hate it and think it’s crap. No matter what else is going on in your life with your family, your friends and your day job.”
But what if the slog appears as a kind of road sign, an important signal of the need for a new approach?
After years of pushing through the creative slog, I began questioning the pervasive notion that discipline is the key to making a successful writing life—or career. I began to consider whether pushing forward was the only way to navigate when overwhelmed. What if nothing is broken, at these pivotal moments, but is just asking for that new perspective, is there a different way of going forward?
What would that different way look like? Here’s what I learned.
Puzzling it out
I’m a big fan of jigsaw puzzles. You may or may not be. I find there are rabid enthusiasts and those who don’t see the point at all.
Partly it’s the northern climate where I live, the long winter days inside, that foster the particular community that happens around a puzzle. Like a roomful of people doing handwork, playing checkers or a board game, to while away the time while the snow comes down. I don’t puzzle much in summer, because outdoors is calling. But when the weather chills, the puzzle table comes out.
We dedicated a drop-leaf table to puzzles. It sits in a sunny corner of our living room under a window for great natural light. Friends bought us a puzzle board; this rests on top of the table and its low rim keeps pieces from flying to the floor via the brush from an errant sleeve. The board has drawers to store extra pieces for those larger puzzles.
I have a certain method with puzzles. I do the edges first. I sort out the interior pieces into the drawers and keep the flat-bottomed edge pieces to create the border.
There’s a soothing quality to anything you know how to do, even a little. Although each new puzzle is a challenge, I always know to start with the edges and proceed from there. I always finish the puzzles, even the hardest ones. I am convinced that puzzling this winter was a key to restore my brain to health, as I recovered from book launch burnout. It’s very relaxing, especially to a device-stimulated brain.
I also love the community of puzzling. We set up one on a table at our friend’s house in Florida, where we camped for a month. The hands-on work of putting pieces distracts the linear mind, so a nonsensical conversation arises, even some made-up silly songs. You get to know someone pretty well when puzzling.
At home, our favorite brand is White Mountain Puzzles, made in New Hampshire. But before this trip, my brother and sister-in-law, also puzzlers, sent me a wooden puzzle. We brought it along.
I had my doubts. Although smaller in number of pieces, the laser-cut wooden pieces looked hard to figure out. But I’m game to try new stuff—that is, until I hit the slog of a steep learning curve. Or the need to shuck off my usual approach and try something new.
This wooden puzzle from my brother was made by a top-of-the-line puzzle company, Liberty Puzzles in Colorado. One puzzle can cost over $100. Now that we’ve worked our way through one Liberty and started a second, I have to admit they are worth every penny. And they taught me a lot about the creative slog.
A new approach
At first, when you open the box, there’s a little thrill, the new adventure awaiting. With a wooden puzzle, there’s often a particular smell (burnt wood) and with Liberty there are intriguing shapes. I loved spreading out all the pieces, and I began, as I always do, looking for the edges.
I learned within a few minutes that there were either a lot of pieces missing from the box or Liberty puzzles don’t have edges. I found exactly twenty flat-bottomed pieces. Not enough.
I sat back in my chair, wondering how to tell my brother I hated his gift. I loved my rhythm with doing puzzles, I loved my method. But the slog was telling me that I had no direction, if I used my usual way. I had to enter this puzzle experience differently.
It took me three frustrating days to figure this entry out—not unlike many times when the creative slog has embraced me via a stuck piece of writing. Maybe it’s like the five stages of grieving?
But no, first I got mad. Who has time for this? Not me. Then I mourned: I walked by the puzzle and longed for the easy, edge-obvious, puzzles I loved at home. Grumbled at the lack of easy entry, the missing pile of obvious edge pieces that always got assembled first. What was a puzzle without clear edges? Then I began accepting my situation, even though I’d still stop at the table and search for a few flat-bottomed pieces and set them aside. But not one fit into another.
How I navigated the slog
In the meantime, two other puzzlers were loving it. They were puzzled (pun intended) by the entry with no clear edges, but that didn’t stop them. The third day, I saw their progress and I forced myself to sit down and join.
Each piece was a work of art. The design was beautiful. I saw animals and guitars and all sorts of shapes in the pieces. Each smelled like slightly burnt wood, not unpleasant at all.
I realized this moment was so much like ones I’ve faced as a writer, staring down a manuscript I hated—or felt dismayed by—that had put me deep into the creative slog. I’d used my will and tried my emergency techniques. But I wondered if there was another way.
I could do one of three things, right now, with this puzzle:
consider a new approach
revise my attitude (move into neutrality and see what might surprise me there)
up my game skills
Three options
I began with the first option: what might be a new approach? Instead of the edges, which had always been my go-to, what else might give me enough foundation to enter this new challenge? I spent a few minutes scanning the cover of the puzzle box. The first thing that grabbed my eye was the middle of the image, so I chose the buffalo and began to collect pieces by color.
As I assembled it, I saw how beautifully these strangely cut wooden puzzle pieces went together. In fact, it was fun. Even addicting.
Soon I was totally into the new approach, loving it. After an hour, I was wondering how I ever got by with those predictable puzzles we’d worked for years.
I didn’t have to try the second option directly—my attitude shifted naturally as I allowed this new approach to delight me. I moved from dislike to wonder.
Wonder is an indicator of attitude shift, to me. It’s a very welcome state where I can easily accept and relax into not having a set course. Just like welcoming all the feedback, say, of a writer’s group’s comments on a manuscript, I felt that push back dissolve into excitement about the possibilities. This tells me I’m definitely out of the slog.
I begin asking, What might I do with this new idea? What might be needed that I didn’t expect?
It’s the opposite of the slog. A very creative place to hang out.
What we got
How the West Was One, by Chris Huang
Here’s what we ended up with. Compare to the image at the top of this post, which was partly completed, and pay attention to the scattering of crazy-shaped pieces that had still not found a home. Like comments on a manuscript, ideas I had no idea what to do with.
But all the pieces eventually fit. Nothing was wrong, nothing had to be fixed at all. The fit was magical, in fact, in an original, unexpected way.
Soft vision, dreamy mind
The third element for navigating the slog is to consider if you need a new skill. I didn’t know what skills were still to learn, in terms of puzzles. They don’t take advanced degrees. It’s just spatial awareness, seeing where one piece fits into another.
So I was surprised to find I did gain a new skill as I sat with the others at the table and watched their movements. I remembered how to relax into the unknown.
We face the unknown whenever we hit the slog. One reason it is a slog is that we feel we must keep going no matter what. But what if facing a slog indicates we are just out of our element, our comfort zone? We’ve known what to do up til now. The work is presenting a new opportunity.
Instead of fighting that, I simply watched how my fellow puzzlers approached the process. I entered their relaxed approach, their enjoyment, their dreamy way of seeing the pieces—the parts—and how they might fit into a whole.
Dreamy is a state of mind very akin to how I write, when I am writing my best. I feel in “flow” and I’m not pushing at all. In fact, the exhilaration of the process makes pushing irrelevant. It’s all joy.
We’re onto our second Liberty puzzle now. I had the same initial reaction when we opened this new box: the weight of a slog ahead of me. But I remember what I’d just learned about not using willpower to push through. I get dreamy, let my vision soften. I scan for where I might enter the puzzle. I start.
We’re almost finished this second one, and it’s a winner. Again.