Want to stop stagnating after a setback? Drop some weight.
Have you ever abandoned yourself?
I have. I checked out. I let situations, substances, and other people dictate how I showed up (or didn’t) for myself and my writing.
I stagnated. Just hung out in those tepid, murky mental waters. It wasn’t fun.
Coming back was (always is) hard. It wasn’t hard because I’d lost the thread of the work and the momentum of incremental progress. It was the series of small betrayals I felt like I committed against myself. Not just against the work, but me as the creator and conduit of the story. Me, the writer, the human trying to be in the world as something more, to fully realize and live myself.
I hope you can’t relate, that this has never happened to you. But something tells me that you can, and it has.
Stagnation goes hand-in-hand with inertia, and inertia is a powerful force. In physics, inertia keeps objects that are at rest that way (unmoving). So when you’re stuck, and have been for a while, your tendency is to stay that way and maybe even get mildly comfortable with it.
To get out and get going, you need to counteract the inertia with a greater force.
The good news is that you have plenty of fierce forces inside yourself. You just have to pay attention and help them out. You have to heed and amplify that call, nudge, or rise inside you.
But is it enough?
In physics, the amount of force you need to apply to make an object move when it’s static is directly related to the mass of the object (how heavy it is). The heavier the object, the harder to move. The more force you need to apply to set it in motion.
So does that mean you should get a feather-light pen and swap out the keys on your keyboard to make it literally easier to write?
Nope.
We’re talking about the mental and emotional weight of all the things that are keeping you stagnant. That are making it harder for the force to move you forward. You need to shed the thought patterns and mindsets that are dragging you down.
Let go of the 5 S’s of Stagnation. These are all traps that are making it so much harder to bounce back and (re)start on your writing work. Their presence is draining you and dragging you down. Let them go.
The Five S’s of Stagnation
1. Shame. It’s harmful and counter-productive. It holds you back to be wrapped up in the narrative of unworthiness that shame likes to lay out. It sucks your energy. And it’s a liar.
You are not inherently bad or unworthy because you quit writing for a while. That’s just not true.
The best response here is acceptance and forgiveness. Accept that you lost the thread. Work through your disappointment with yourself. And remind yourself that the only meaning your past actions or inaction ever has is the meaning you give them.
2. Self-directed anger. This is one is really similar to shame, but even more active and therefore even more draining. Seriously, all the energy you’re expending being mad at yourself for delaying is better spent on the writing you’re coming back to.
Berating yourself about what you didn’t do in the past is some Scooby Doo style running in place.
Self-acceptance and self-forgiveness will be your champions against anger, too. You didn’t write. Accept that as something that happened, and forgive yourself. That’ll free up some of your energy, your life force, to actually get you out of the stagnant spot and back into that story.
3. Self-doubt. It’s common for this to creep in after you’ve spent time away from writing (and really, anytime, the sneaky jerk). Maybe you’ve got an inner critic that’s saying “Well, if you could do it, you would have. Since you didn’t, I guess you can’t.”
It makes sense that we go here, honestly. Our brains are wired to look for predictive patterns, for indicators of the future in the past. So it’s easy to think that just because you haven’t, yet, you never will.
Shush that sh*t, because it’s also a lie. Your past inaction, waffling, bad writing, second-guessing, and other struggles are NOT indicative of what you are capable of, or how amazing your work will be when you do it.
4. Scarcity thinking. This one takes many forms, including jealousy, comparison, and the unwillingness to try because “the book market is saturated”. But someone else’s successes or how many steps ahead of you they are in their work has no bearing on what you can and will do, because it’s not a race and or a zero-sum game where there’s just one winner.
In the same way the human brain likes patterns, we like comparison. We like order, knowing where things go, we want to know if we are ahead or behind, valuable or not. The problem is that our brains are not actually very good at it. Again, we make up meanings to go with our comparisons.
Janet just got an agent, therefore she’s going to get published before me, and that means one less spot on the shelves for my book, should it ever actually come out. I might as well just give up the dream of writing now and go back to playing Fortnite.
Those conclusions you drew (ok, I drew) are completely made up. You made them up (ok, I made them up…but you get my point?). Don’t assume you know how this will go just because of how it’s gone for others.
(By the way, I’m not here to tell you that you should use other people’s success as inspiration or motivation. If that’s your inclination, then you’re probably already doing it, and I encourage you to lean into that harder. But there’s nothing wrong with you if that’s not how your mind works right now. No use twisting yourself in knots about it.)
It doesn’t matter that Roz from your writing group sold a thousand books on Amazon last week, or that Myra is already done with their memoir and you’ve only got thirty pages.
Other people’s successes have nothing to do with your ability to also succeed. Readers don’t just buy one book and then never buy a book again (ask me how I know…it’s not hoarding if it’s books).
Shifting away from scarcity thinking means you’ll stop being bogged down by unnecessary concerns, and free up your mind for what’s really going to get you moving forward on your current WIP or that new manuscript you’re scoping out.
5. Someone else’s opinions. This one might feel like external weight, but it’s easy to let it saddle you with internal baggage. To be clear, other people’s opinions of your writing naturally matter…to a point and AT a point. For instance, of course readers’ opinions of your published book will matter to you.
However…
The thing I’m talking about here is when you let one or more naysayers’ negativity get under your skin and live rent-free there awhile.
Maybe your skeptical significant other thinks you’re “wasting your time” or the advice-wielding Wattpad warrior in that Facebook group keeps telling you you’re “doing it wrong”. Or you think your college mentor would be disappointed in you, or that your brother will hate your writing. You’re scared your kid won’t be proud, or that your mother was right and you shouldn’t be “airing your laundry” on paper like this.
Let that sh*t go.
You don’t have to slam the person or be mean about it. You don’t have to cut them out, tell them off, or come at them with “eff you energy”. (Spoiler alert: That can all be draining to do for some of us.)
Maybe you set a boundary around the conversation concerning your writing, let them know (kindly) that you’d rather not talk about it. Maybe you simply lean more on the people who are bringing positivity to the topic.
What you do about this externally, though, is way less important than how you manage it internally and what you give it power to impact inside yourself. In reality, someone else’s inability to acknowledge or understand your light is their problem. You’ve gotta remind yourself of that. Stop making it your problem by letting it dictate what you do or don’t do.
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