I did an interview last week and was asked about writer’s block. Real solid, beat your head against the desk writer’s block. And the answer I gave during the interview has stuck with me. I’ve been thinking about it ever since. You see, I don’t have writer’s block, at least not in the way that it’s commonly spoken about. For me, the writing stops, the words stop, the muse clams up, when whatever I’m doing isn’t in alignment with my values or there is some dissonance.
The other reason why it happens, the reason I really couldn’t get to in the interview, but could once I sat down and thought about my writing and what works and what doesn’t, is grief.
That’s right. Grief.
It’s very common not to be creative during times of grief, especially when we lose a loved one or a companion animal. About three months ago, I had to send a senior cat across the rainbow bridge (He was 17 with cancer. Fuck cancer!), and in the evenings he would curl up next to me where I sat with my laptop and purr while I worked. I miss that. I miss it a lot. And his absence, even though I have other cats, many of whom keep me company while I’m writing, hit hard.
That grief seems easy to deal with in comparison to the other grief, the type of emotion that hits because we aren’t selling the numbers of books that we want or not making the kind of money we need to in order to quit our job. Some of us have been writing for a very long time, and not being able to hit those milestones, combined with all the upheaval in publishing, well that grief is hard to carry and it can make us stop writing.
That’s the kind of grief I wanted to talk about but couldn’t articulate in the moment.
Because I don’t think we talk about it enough.
I know I don’t talk about it enough, and I’m a grief specialist. A grief guide, as I like to call myself. Someone willing to sit in the dark, cold, rainy places alongside you and help you to see that there is a way through, that you can live with grief.
Because grief doesn’t go away. We may make room for it, even figure out how to write with it, or write around it, but it will pop up again. And when it does, we need to face it. Not shove it down. Not get over it. Not forget about it.
If we are passionate about our writing, if we love the work we do, then it is natural that aspects of it will cause us grief. Because grief and love are two ends of the same line, and we can exist at multiple points along that line at the same time.
Quantum reality, meet grief.
Writing doesn’t have to stop when we hit the grief end of that line. We can plot points along the line, leading toward love, and let that be our guide. We can use love to allow the creativity back into our lives, and we can use love to begin writing again, to tell the words of our heart.
Would it surprise you to know that I couldn’t write this blog post? But when I opened myself up to you, to whoever is reading this at this moment, and when I tapped into my love of helping, my love of writing and connecting with others about writing, the words started to flow faster than I can type them. And that’s saying a lot because on any given day I’m typing between 80-100 words per minute.
Grief happens. It’s going to happen again. But it doesn’t have to stop our writing. And that is the most inspiring thing I can think of sharing with you at the moment.
Keep writing.
Would you be interested in an author’s grief circle?
If so, please fill out this form to be notified about more details when they become available. Right now the circle will be estimated to be an hour on zoom with a brief talk and then open time for discussion. The talk will be recorded; the discussion will not be.