Go Do Something Else

This summer I’m reading a book by Graham Greene. The main character in the story is a novelist. He’s not a hugely successful novelist, but he sells enough books to pay his bills. At one point in the story, he sits down to continue his daily work of writing and says:

“So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper.” (p. 25)

Another time in the story, our author friend spends the afternoon doing other things: paying visits, stopping in a store or two, and walking around the neighborhood. When he returns to his desk, he is delighted to find that his words flow much more quickly than they did before!

So much is made out of the habit and discipline of writing. “You have to sit down and write,” our teachers tell us. And they are right! You can’t get any good words written if you’re not writing any words at all. You have to do both: write the good ones and the bad ones. Hopefully you can circle back and delete the bad ones later!

But sometimes, if you’ve reached a point where the story won’t move, you should get up and do something else. If you’re truly stuck, maybe your brain needs a break. At that moment, it might be the best idea to get up out of your chair and go for a walk. Do a chore. Talk to a friend. Go outside.

I’ve sometimes heard people say that if you work with your mind (as writers do), you should take a break by doing something with your hands. Cooking, gardening, cleaning, shoveling snow….these are all ways to get your body moving. After you’re done, you might find that your mind (what Greene calls the “Unconscious” above) has gone to work without you knowing it. Maybe when you sit back down, you’ll have a path in front of you that you didn’t have before.

This is a delicate balance, because you might just get moving to avoid your work of writing. Some writers joke that you can tell they have a writing deadline in front of them when their house is really clean. We don’t want to avoid; we want to get into a good cycle of working and then resting.