Creativity Engine is on the Fritz

Writing is funny. Sometimes for me it is literally the easiest thing in the world. Half the time I feel like I could write a story on demand, out of thin air. But every once in a while it becomes hard, nearly impossible. Back in August of 2020, six months in to COVID, I started writing a story. At the time I wasn’t sure what it was going to be, a short story or novel. All I had was the basic premise and the broad outline of a protagonist. With a lot of lockdown/quarantine time on my hands, I started writing. I blazed through the first dozen chapters rather quickly. The story had exploded into something far more complex. It would be a novel.

Then around Christmas of 2020, I took a break and sat it aside for a couple months. The new year was starting and I was busy, but the characters were never very far from my mind, always dancing around in my head trying to get me to come and play. Finally at the beginning of this summer I took up the story again. One chapter after another poured forth from wherever it is that they come from. Every time I sat down to write the words came with uninterrupted speed and clarity. By August the thing had 24 chapters and 50,000 words. 

Then, one day everything stopped. The gears of the creativity engine had seized up and no matter how determined I was to write, nothing came….nothing.

So, there it sits, frozen, leaden, atrophied. I read random chapters occasionally trying to find the spark. Nothing. I still love the story and care a lot about the characters, but for the last two months, I got nothing.

This sort of thing never happens to me. The other three novels I’ve written were mostly uninterrupted 6-8 month journeys where I only took a few weeks off to tend to more pressing matters—like earning a living. This thing is different. I’ve hit a wall so formidable that I’m afraid I might never break through. Maybe this is where the story just runs out of steam and dies. Just because its never happened to me before doesn’t mean it never does happen. An unfinished story…I’m sure there are a million of them out there.

Fourteen months ago, this is how it started with this one paragraph introduction…

Daniel Sebastian Fitzgerald’s life had been an unqualified success right up to the day he took a drink from an unopened bottle of water he found while jogging in a park less than a mile from his house. At least that was the initial conclusion which most of the family had settled upon after every other explanation for his implosion had failed to withstand logical scrutiny. So bizarre were the circumstances surrounding his metamorphosis that a family of educated people had been reduced to believing an unproven and unprovable theory involving a random bottle of water that had never been found or tested for toxins that might have explained how an otherwise circumspect 56 year old man could have so suddenly and spectacularly gone off the rails. The Fitzgerald family, being as unaccustomed to and unprepared for scandal as any tribe in North America had not handled the drama well. Accusations began to fly within the family, blaming everyone from his wife of 30 years, to his impossible to please father, to his meddling mother, all the way down to his disrespectful children. But, the writer has gotten ahead of himself. The reader by now is naturally wondering about the nature of Daniel Sebastian Fitzgerald’s metamorphosis, and not nearly as concerned with the infighting of his extended family. I will attempt to tell the tale honestly without bias or judgement, for in the day and age in which we live, this story needs to be told.