My Breakthrough in Learning to Cut Myself Some Slack, Decrease My Frustration and Increase My Writing Enjoyment

Every writer has obstacles they have to learn to overcome.

I’ve been having a hard time writing lately. When I first joined Medium, I was tentative with my writing which limited how many stories I published. As I began getting more comfortable on the platform and joined one of the Facebook groups, I started writing and publishing more. I started experimenting with my style and voice, and worked on writing stories that had a more personal touch. My views and earnings started to climb and I found myself excited about getting up to write every morning.

Then a couple of months ago I hit a wall. I found that I couldn’t seem to come up with anything interesting to write about. The fun I’d been having started to evaporate. Over the past month, writing has often felt like pulling teeth. I had to use every weapon in my arsenal to force myself to write a story every day. I even began dreading sitting down in front of the computer frequently leaving it until late in the day

One of the biggest problems I was experiencing had to do with trying to force myself to write something just so I could publish it. I tend to be a fairly wordy writer on my best days as well as being a pantser, meaning I don’t plan what I’m going to write beforehand. These things resulted in me having an idea, starting to write about it and realizing by the time I’d written a page and a half that none of it had anything to do with the story I intended to create.

I don’t have great frustration tolerance and as this problem became more frequent, I found myself throwing my laptop down on the bed, saying, “I’m done for the day,” then finding something to waste time on. Sometimes I would come back and write a poem, or maybe a flash fiction story, but I felt that this was just fluff I was substituting for more substantive articles.

Another related problem was that I was interacting less in Facebook groups and reading fewer articles each day. Previously, when I read stories in the morning something would always give me an idea for one of my own. But now nothing seemed to be appealing to my creativity.

I also found that seeing the sharing threads and recognizing all the people who wrote new stories daily or sometimes two or three times a day made me more frustrated and anxious. Of course, the decreased social interaction didn’t help my mood either.

I knew something had to change or the problem would only get worse. I needed a different way of thinking about the situation. When it happened today, as I threw my computer down, I decided not to let myself give up. I pulled the computer back towards me and began analyzing what I’d written.

The piece was about the benefits of starting a publication. But 300 words in, I still hadn’t started to address the topic. I talked about finding Medium, being overwhelmed by everything at first, learning more about writing and publishing here and starting to write more frequently. A page in, and I hadn’t even brought up publications yet.

Thinking about it some more, I realized that what I told myself in my head every time the problem occurred was, “This is going nowhere. It has nothing to do with anything.” I had assumed all of this was because, while I may have decided on a topic, I had nothing worthwhile to say about it.

But suddenly I had one of those, “Ah hah!” moments. I remembered a fiction writing class I had taken, where I had the first several chapters of a first draft novel work-shopped. The first thing the instructor said was that I could get rid of the whole first chapter.

I was taken aback. The first chapter gave the backstory for the entire thing. The instructor said something that stuck with me. “All of that is your way of getting into the story. But the reader doesn’t need to get into it that way.”

At the time I had realized that I did that with all of my fiction. I gave a huge lead in with all kinds of backstory which I didn’t need once I finished telling it. Though it was hard, I struck entire pages from the beginning of everything I wrote. At first, this seemed to be cause important details to be left out. But after putting them away for a week or so, when I came back to them, nothing seemed to be lacking any longer.

I never thought of my non-fiction in terms of that lesson. But I realize now I do the exact same thing. I give a lengthy account of why I came to write the post, or what I had been doing that day when the idea came to me or other lengthy lead ins that don’t contribute to the article.

Yet I’ve come to understand that this isn’t an indication of poor writing ability or a meandering mind that can’t focus on the linear development of a topic. All of that extra information is the non-fiction equivalent of backstory. It is my way of getting into my articles. While it isn’t necessary for the reader to understand the article, it is necessary for me to be able to get to the point where the article should begin.

When I realized this, it was as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I no longer had the need to toss my computer, or tell myself how I’d started yet another worthless article that wasn’t going anywhere. I just had to keep writing until the point where the discussion of the topic began, then go back and take out all the extra stuff at the beginning when I edited it.

I substituted something else for the maladaptive things I had been saying to myself before.

“Kill your darlings. Just kill them.”

Now the only potential obstacle to my writing is if the workmen in my apartment hear me and report my murderous nature to the police! And yes, I edited out over 200 words from the beginning of this story.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had work featured in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured in several anthologies. She is Editor for 1-One-Infinity, The Partnered Pen and One Table, One World and is Editor in Chief for Promposity and Mental Gecko. She is also the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

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