Follow in Stephen King’s Footsteps and See Your Finished Writing as Dead Skin Cells

The freedom that lies beyond non-attachment to our work

I’ve been plugged up. Stopped up. Constipated. Nothing new is coming out. I’ve tried to stoke the creative process by publishing old writing that has been haunting the cobwebbed corners of my external memory drive for a decade. It has not worked. Day after day, I continue to show up at my desk, waiting for the Muse to return with my inspiration on a silver platter, (along with grapes and exotic cheeses, please and thank you).

For the past month or so, I’ve been feeling as though my creative well has run dry. There is a scene in the 1987 movie, Baby Boom, where the main character, played by Diane Keaton, suffers a mental breakdown after finding out the well outside her rustic Vermont home has dried up. At first, she thinks the well can be filled back up with the hose around back but then breaks into a grade-A rant when the handyman tells her she has to tap into the county line for an exorbitant cost.

I am the dried-up well. Instead of being filled up with new ideas, I’ve become obsessed with my inability to write. It’s like the hangnail I’ve torn to shreds and keep coming back to if only to make it bleed.

The mind of a stopped-up creative goes to strange and haunted places. I became fascinated with the cornucopia of ways famous writers committed suicide. At 59, Virginia Wolff filled her pockets with stones and jumped into the Ouse River. Anne Sexton locked herself in her garage and breathed in carbon monoxide from her running car until she died at age 45. At 31, Sylvia Plath gave her children milk and cookies and then stuck her head into the gas oven in her kitchen (very similar to the scene in M. Night Shyamalan’s, The Visit). Earnest Hemmingway blew his head off with a shotgun. These are only a few examples of the writers I have read and loved. (If you are macabre like me, click here to read about other writers who met an untimely death by their own hands.)

The more I obsessed about my writing paralysis, the less writing I did, and since I haven’t been writing, I’ve spiraled into the rabbit hole of finding the cause for my constipated inspiration and possible ways of creating flow.

The cause of my writing demise

The insatiable desire to be seen, admired, and remunerated for my work and the false belief that my writing from the past is superior to anything I have produced in the present. This is the egoic trap that has chained my inspiration and creativity and starved it until only a shrunken head remains.

In her book Thunder and Lightning, Natalie Goldberg writes, “Bareboned, you are on the path with no markers, only the skulls of those who never made it back.”

If writing has the capacity to break us and no one is immune, what then is the secret of a successful writer? Is there a way to access the bottomless well of inspiration and not be burned up by obsession? Knowing what awaits on the other side of writerly insanity, who in their right mind would voluntarily devote their life to creative pursuits? (You and me…oh right.)

What I know is this. As writers, we bleed our innermost secrets, desires, and fears onto the page with the intention of having the reader consume them. We yearn for others to feed on our words, just as we feed on the words of others for inspirational nourishment. It is a form of literary cannibalism.

Take Shakespeare for example. His writing, although 500 years old, is like aged whiskey. It’s excellent and will always be good for consumption. I’ve come to accept that, unlike Shakespeare’s whiskey, my old writing is more like forgotten left-overs at the back of the freezer — not suitable for re-consumption in its original form.

King’s Secret to inspiration

Stephen King has written 64 novels. Millions of readers consume his words and let’s be honest, as prolific as Stephen King is, his novels are no aged whiskey. They are good beer and cheap wine (with all due respect, Mr. King). They are meant for quick consumption, rather than reflection. And the beautiful thing is, he doesn’t care!

In a brief interview with Bangor Daily News from seven years ago, King shared this nugget of wisdom. “The fun of writing novels isn’t in the finished product…the novels I wrote that sit on my shelves are like dead skin. They are things that are done, but I love the process.”

Go where the story leads you. Go where the book leads you. View creativity like a little red thread that goes into a baseboard and you just start to pull it out and you see what’s at the other end of it. Sooner or later, you’ll get there. ~Stephen King

To be able to write and then completely release the finished product is the marrow of creativity — the non-attachment that the Buddhists talk about. When I write, I write. When I eat, I eat. When I walk, I walk. When I read, I read. When I make love, I make love.

Trying to resurrect my old writing is like re-animating Frankenstein. Only pain and suffering ensues. The past is dead. It is not meant for re-consumption, but rather fertilization.

I love Stephen King’s image of the red thread being pulled from the hole in the baseboard. I also love the image of the sunny dandelion blossom that turns into the white moon of seeds, each one floating on currents of air to grow a brand new flower elsewhere. Let our writing resemble the seeds of a dandelion, unattached and free.

Read more on the craft of writing here:

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