Shaking off Stagnancy

are you feeling it too?

Who knew there was a store dedicated to managing me? (Brooklyn, March 2023)

I love writing. I understand the concept of Dorothy Parker’s “I hate writing. I love having written” (and I love having written, too) but I really, truly love making up characters and putting words in their mouths and feelings in their hearts. So why have I been avoiding it so much lately?

It’s not just me. My writer friends tell me they are feeling it too. Either the words themselves are hard or there are other tasks that take priority. “I haven’t written at all in the last month” or “I wrote, I think? I don’t know” or “I feel so far away from it.”

I’m not feeling blocked. I have plenty of ideas and plans, and when I do sit down to write, I get work done. But it has been tough to access flow, and often the words I write are only ok.

Last month I went to New York City for a few days. I did a school event, walked around, went to the zoo and the museum, had breakfast with Ruth. I was looking forward to this trip for a lot of reasons, but one was the hope that being in new surroundings would inspire me. That’s certainly happened before – I go to a new place and the new things I see make me think about characters and stories.

Accidental selfie, Brooklyn Museum, March 2023

New York was fun. My daughter Zuzu came with me and we had a blast. I saw a lot of things that were inspiring, potentially, but I wasn’t particularly inspired. It felt weird.

This is the sort of thing I feel the need to figure out. It’s too important to let it sit. I need to know why writing has been so hard, why I took a trip and experienced it all like a regular tourist instead of like an artist. 

What’s throwing me off is knowing that I can consistently write good stories. I’ve been doing it for years. I love playing with words, the trial and error, and the process of watching a story transform through revision. So what’s different? Why does writing feel lackluster? I meditate, exercise, and do morning pages. Shouldn’t that be enough? How did I get here?

Here are my initial thoughts:

• The book I’m working on is hard, and the resistance is simply because the writing is complicated and difficult.

• The news in the world is bad and it’s hard to be inspired when there's this sad energy everywhere.

• Is there something going on astrologically, idk? That might explain why so many of us are experiencing this.

• There is AI writing everywhere right now, and I’m not threatened by it, except it is all really dull, and it’s uninspiring to be continually confronted by vague, boring, heartless robot writing.

• Money worries are making it hard to be light and free enough to be a conduit for creativity.

• Is there too much dirt in my house? Do I need to do spring cleaning? Although I’ve been feeling this way for a while. There is something, though, to bringing in lightness by clearing and cleaning. 

Maybe everything I just listed is true. I feel like I've got armor on, to protect me from the news, the worries, the planets. How do I take it off so I can be light and free, open to inspiration? Tara Brach talks about how when snakes shed their skins they are all raw and fragile and new underneath, and I know that’s how I need to be. The process of growing makes you raw and fragile. I need to get to that place of newness, openness, and fragile vulnerability, but for some reason I stay in this protective ball, which keeps my heart safe, but also makes it harder to let inspiration in. There is a thing you do in protection magic where you imagine yourself in an egg-shaped container, protected, safe, not able to be poked by all the forces out in the world who are wielding sharp sticks. And I need that egg space sometimes, but if I’m spending all my time in the egg, I’m not letting stories and words come. Creating a barrier between myself and the sharp sticks means I’m also closed off to inspiration. I need to shed the egg / the skin / the cocoon, even though it will make me vulnerable.

Here’s the other thing: I have been spending my time on work, on business, just not on writing. I’m doing edits on 2024 and 2025 picture books. I went to NYC for the Driscoll’s book. I’m writing essays here and building an online class, which led to having to do some massive, necessary, still-in-progress website updates. All of these things are things I wanted to do.

Last year I wrote about the river of inspiration, which is a (metaphorical) place where I am in the flow of ideas, creativity, and inspiration. When I wrote about it last year, it was in the context of how social media yanked me out of the river. But I’m realizing now that I don’t have to be in the river all the time to lead a creative life. There have been projects where I’ve been in the river for weeks. It’s great. It’s also wet. It’s not realistic to think I could spend all day in the flow of writing, forever.

The River of Inspiration, Part 1

The River of Inspiration, Part 2

I’m in a season where I’ve pulled myself out of the water and am working on the riverbank. Maybe my feet dip into the river, but mostly I’m on the side, doing river-adjacent tasks. Which is fine! It all comes down to knowing it’s fine, and knowing that the river isn’t going anywhere, and I can step back into it when I’m ready. Sometimes people get out of the river and in the process of doing other tasks, they turn around so their back is to the water, and then they think the river is gone.

A few years ago, a writer I know found out that their new picture book manuscript was very similar to another book that had just been announced, and they were anxious about the similarities. 

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m sure the stories aren’t actually anything alike.”

“But this is the first book I’ve written in years,” they said. “If this book isn’t going to work, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

I don’t know the circumstances that led to years of not-writing, but the fact that they wrote one book after a fallow period doesn't mean it’s the only book left. It’s hard, but if the book isn’t going to work, you get back into the river. When you think one manuscript is the only thing you can write, your back is to the river. You need to turn around, face it, and get in. I don’t think that manuscript ever became a book, but I do know that the writer has written and sold plenty of books since then. They got into the river.

So here I am, sitting on the rocks and dirt, but still facing the water. And I know I have time. There’s no rush. (A reminder of this came via something I wrote to Cal Newport’s podcast, about how my writing shed lends itself to slow productivity. I wrote it several months ago, but he talked about it this week. Thanks for the reminder, past Julie.) 

The key for me is to stay curious. If I can approach the world with curiosity, as someone who sees stories everywhere, then it will be easier to access inspiration when I step back into the river. I do my work now knowing that just because I’m not writing fiction today, I’m still a writer of fiction. It’s not gone forever. It’s not gone at all. The river’s right there, flowing, waiting, and I can get back into it whenever I’m ready.

Behind the Paywall

Thank you to everyone who took advantage of my one-month-free special during March! That was so much fun, that I have now permanently set the free trial period to 14 days rather than the standard Substack 7-day trial.

Thoughts and Links

• The upcoming Brooke Shields documentary looks so interesting. I hadn't really absorbed until I watched the trailer how much she was a part of my childhood— how I was always aware of her, how we all wanted to be her. And then, based on the trailer, how messed up that is. And also I never really thought about "this is not a great situation for her." I remember being like "lucky duck, nothing comes between her and her Calvins" or "oh, Blue Lagoon, that's fun." Not that 10-year-old Julie was in a space to be like "oh, the patriarchal societal structure infantilizes women to keep them weak."

• I loved the Duke Riley exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, Death to the Living: Long Live Trash (more photos here). After talking about it with Ruth, she pointed me to Fly by Night, where Riley trained thousands of pigeons to fly over a barge. So cool.

• Read this essay “My Ugly Bathroom” for kind and wise words about the freedom in not having to make everything in your house perfect and shiny, via

  Lisa Olivera
  .

• There is a bakery not far from me, Tandem Coffee Roasters, which makes unbelievably delicious biscuits, pastries, and pie (here’s a photo of me with a loaded biscuit on my birthday in 2017, so you can get a sense of the size). Also they serve something called an iced malted coffee that is SO GOOD. Early in the pandemic, they sold the recipe to the biscuits as a fundraiser, and we happily bought it and made our own biscuits. They are huge, very buttery, and smell incredible. Make them for guests, make them for a Wednesday morning. Because now you can make them too. There was a write-up in the NY Times, and they shared the recipe. Make sure you go watch the YouTube video of baker Briana Holt showing the biscuit-construction method.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• Dan Santat’s new graphic memoir, A First Time for Everything, is great.

• Ramona recommended The Way of the Hive by Jay Hosler, and it’s informative and really cute. I learned a ton about bees!

• I got Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood last time I was in Print, and it’s a funny story of a teenager’s summer at her very rigid, barely conversational, Scottish great grandmother, and the repercussions for years afterward.