The Writing Muscle

I think it’s located right between the eyes. At least, that’s the part that feels sore and tight after a day of creative concentration.

Lately I’ve been devoting my time to the yard, since we were on our town’s annual garden tour on Sunday. Now that I’m back to writing, I find that my creative muscles have atrophied. I’m distracted and blocked, and making myself sit down in a chair with my fingers on the keys feels like torture.

I’m finding plenty of ways to procrastinate, of course. Taking the trash barrels out to the curb, sweeping the entire house, returning emails, writing blog posts, making a hundred little gingerbread nuts that are so addictive I have to keep them in another room so I don’t eat them all. (But then, of course, I get up to grab one every five minutes—which helps use up a lot of time I’d otherwise spend staring at the screen not doing anything.)

I’ve gone through this many times before. It’s why people like Stephen King recommend sitting down to write every day without exception—when you practice doing something daily, it gets easier. You’re training your brain to be creative on command, which is a skill that’s difficult to develop and easy to lose. Of course your creativity is not limited to a specific time or place, but if you impose a routine, your brain knows—okay, when we sit down at 11:00 in this particular chair and open the Word document, it’s time to settle down and work. The unruly brain is wrangled.

These couple of days, though, before the muscles are back in shape, when I feel so restless I want to jump out of my skin and I can’t even write a short blog post without switching over to check social media eighteen times…

I’ll keep sitting here. Practicing.