On Getting Unstuck

5 things to keep in mind when you're stuck on a creative project

Big week around here, guys! I wrote more this week than I have in absolute AGES! Huzzah! Pew-pew-pew! Dancing lady emoji!

I’ve been stuck on a particular project for MORE THAN A YEAR. Not kidding: one year ago this week, I went away for a few days to work on said project. I made a little progress on that trip, but then came back to daily life and stared blankly at the screen every time I tried to take the next couple steps. I’ve worked in fits and starts, changed direction a thousand times. For a while I thought it was three different books, like a series. Then two. Now I’m back to one.

For a long time, I kept saying I couldn’t find the edges of it, like I couldn’t define the boundary lines of what it was and what it wasn’t. Then for a while it felt too different from anything I’d ever done…and sometimes that felt energizing but other times I felt massively intimidated by it, like who am I to just decide to do a totally different thing?

I avoided working on it for months on end, using all manner of excuses—some valid, some not. I told myself that I was still too burned out from my last book launch…um, that last book launch was in the spring of 2022. Several of my writer friends who launched books that same season have now written and released entirely new books—I’ve been lapped. I traveled a lot this winter and spring, and I’m extremely good at the whole “well, since you can’t really get all the way into it before this next trip, better not to dive into it at all” game…I played that one for six months at least.

During the day, my various excuses and also my other work projects keep me pretty busy, but my middle-of-the-night self is having a field day with this situation: what’s wrong with you? You’ll never write again. All your good work is behind you. Any good thing you’ve ever done is a fluke. It’s not great.

Finally, earlier this week I sat down to just try to make sense of it again—not the project, but my drama about the project…what’s going on? What’s under all these feelings? How do I get through? Is there something I haven’t admitted to myself? Is there something going on here that I don’t want to face, and that thing is keeping me stuck?

Well, actually, I didn’t even get that far. I told myself that I had two choices: I could either dig as deep as I could into all those questions, or I could just open up the damn project and start typing. I picked Option B…and then I worked on it all day and again the next day and again the next day, and I made more progress on it than I have in a year.

Also this week I completed two other work tasks that I’ve been dreading literally for months…it’s all contagious: getting unstuck in one place gets you unstuck in all sorts of other places, and I feel exuberantly happy about all of it…here I am, unstuck! Here I am, writing thousands of words, cutting and pasting and arranging! Here I am, feeling all creative and happy and powerful!

I’m delighted, but also I really want to learn from this—why now? What got me unstuck? And if I can learn something about all of this now, can I get unstuck faster the next time?