Overcoming Obstructions to Writing

(Photo by Travis Saylor from Pexels)

Just a quick post to share something small I learned about how my mind works when it comes to writing.  For the last week I’ve made no progress on Lost Girl (Leeth Dossier #5).  There were everyday tasks which I felt needed to be done (like coffee: harvest time won’t wait), but that wasn’t enough to explain it all.  Those tasks only took up the time and energy for a portion of each day.

I’ve written about the Unconscious Thought Theory several times now, and I know for certain it’s heavily involved in my own creative process.  (I strongly suspect it’s true for everyone, but I don’t know that.)  So I know a lot of the work happens in the unconscious.  I also noticed previously that I was blocked when my conscious plan for how a story would unfold didn’t agree with what was developing in my unconscious.  In hindsight, I felt my unconscious threw up obstacles to stop me heading down that wrong path I had consciously planned.

I also know the neuroscience says the unconscious parts of the brain have something like fifty ‘processing units’ running in parallel. That sounds like a lot, but it’s a finite number.

Anyway, what happened was that tonight I tackled a task that had been weighing on my mind for a couple of months now.  (Selecting and booking a hotel for the world SF convention next year in Wellington, New Zealand, to be precise.)  I felt some relief as soon as I’d done so.

What I realised later however was that when I started to think about the next scene in Lost Girl, my mind didn’t instantly shy away and offer up a distraction.  Then I recognised that mental shying away was something I’d learned to do a long time ago to protect myself from worry about a situation I had no control over.  At that point I finally put two and two together and realised my unconscious was trying to solve the hotel booking problem and didn’t want to spare time for book creation.  Each time I tried it distracted me in a non-creative direction.  Sneaky, wise unconscious!

So, if you’re finding yourself blocked, go looking for a cause and then tackle that.  There’s probably a lot of different things that could be the issue.  Two I’ve discovered are 1) your plan is wrong, and 2) you have something else that needs your unconscious attention first.  The unconscious is great at making patterns and weighing up combinations of possibilities, but it has limits!