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Writing When You’re Sick, Tired, or Just Hate the World

Photo by desiitaly on Flickr.

In a perfect universe, I’d begin every writing day with nine hours’ sleep, a perfectly brewed cup of coffee, nothing on my work schedule, and a gentle rainstorm to keep me from even thinking about going outside. I’d have a clearly formed idea, a flawless outline, and several unbroken hours to work.

While I’m at it, I would also like to write with telepathy from the seat of my private jet while I get a neck massage from a Czech supermodel.

Writing when you’d rather not is one of the most important skills you can ever cultivate as a writer. Anyone can write when they’re feeling fine and the muse has just hit them between the eyes like a thunderbolt from Valhalla. But there will be days when every syllable is like a back-alley fistfight with a rabid hobo. That’s when your mettle really gets tested.

Any book, blog or seminar on writing advice will tell you to write every day, and with good reason. To me, the most important reason is this: every day that you write hones your craft just a little more. Every day that you don’t write dulls it just a little more. For most people, it dulls a lot faster than it hones. Go a week or a month without writing anything and you can practically hear the shriek of rusty gears grinding together.

Good habits are easy to build when there aren’t any obstacles in your path, but it’s an imperfect universe, and obstacles happen. In fact, obstacles are nigh-omnipresent. So what do you do when you’re sick, tired, or just plain hate the world, but you still want to get words down on the page?

The Stimulus Package

Let’s get the easy one out of the way. Stimulants! Imbibe caffeine in various forms. Take a vitamin pill. Drink a whole tumbler of orange juice. Some artificial stimulation can sometimes get you through the job, as long as it doesn’t further compromise your health.

Embrace the Delerium

Writers love to romanticize the image of the drunken author who composes his or her masterpieces while smashed. Why not do the same for the natural incoherence brought on by fatigue, sinus congestion, or having just chugged an entire bottle of Robitussin? So you couldn’t string a proper sentence together if someone put a gun to your face — they can bill you! Let your incoherence be your guide. Write whatever comes to your poor addled brain. Freewrite like an escapee from a mental ward. Some of it might end up far more usable than you think.

Shake it Up

If your condition (and your conscience) won’t allow you to work on your chosen masterpiece while half-dead, work on something else. Start something new and impractical. Try your hand at dirty haiku. You may not create anything deathless, but writing is writing. That thing I said last time about giving yourself permission to suck? That goes double for when you’re sick.

Work it In

Say, have you got a chapter where one of your characters just took a dart full of dimethyltryptamine to the face, or drank Windex till he saw a UFO? Well, would you like one? Nothing gives you perspective on being sick, tired, or full of hate than actually being those things. Now’s your chance to get those feelings down on the page. It’s not death’s door, it’s research!

Throw it Out

A lot of writers I know loathe tossing out anything they write. Their words are like their precious babies, the nectar of their very soul. Why not take a sick day from your well-manicured neurosis? Rattle off a freewrite and then shred it. Bang out a wild, incoherent blog post and then delete it. Fall deeply out of love with your words for one day. Meditate on impermanence while you listen to The Cure’s Disintegration at top volume. Turn your vitriol on your own work. You can kiss and make up tomorrow.

Just Do a Half-Assed Job

Accept that what you’re writing now probably won’t be your best, and possibly in the running for your worst. Just remember that it’s still better than nothing. Earn some street cred with yourself. Make this your war story. Sure, you might look at what you wrote a few days from now and toss it out in disgust. Then again, maybe not. But either way, you put pen to paper or butt to chair and did it, even when you didn’t want to. Go you. Pound it. High five. Okay, well maybe later.

This one goes out to my good friend Tracy McCusker, who is on the mend. Feel better, Tracy.

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Two Kinds of Obstacle-Stacking

The basic unit of the dramatic scene is this: give a character a goal to pursue, have them pursue it, then move that goal further away. Rinse, raise the stakes, repeat. The harder your characters fight to reach their goal (and the further they’re driven away from it), the more your readers will love it.

This is sometimes called obstacle-stacking, and my favorite example of the technique actually comes from a movie: the famous V-Wing fight from Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was hoping to track down a video of the sequence to post here, but unfortunately, no dice. Basically, it goes like this:

  • Indy and Marion emerge from the Well of Souls and attempt to escape the Nazis on a stolen plane.
  • Indy sneaks up to try to knock out the pilot. Before he can get there, he’s spotted by another guy.
  • Indy gets back down off the plane, beats the other guy unconscious, but now the pilot sees what’s going on.
  • The burly mechanic shows up and starts beating Indy to a pulp.
  • Marion takes the blocks out from under the plane’s landing gear.
  • The pilot draws a pistol and nearly shoots Indy, but Marion knocks him out with the blocks.
  • The unconscious guard falls on the plane controls, the plane is now spinning slowly in place with the propellers running.
  • Now Indy and the burly mechanic have to avoid the deadly propellers while they’re fighting.
  • Marion tries to stop the plane, but the hatch closes on her and she’s locked in.
  • The rotating plane knocks open the gas tank of a truck. Gas spills across the runway.
  • A whole mess of guards show up in trucks, armed with machine guns.
  • Marion machine-guns the guards, but one of the trucks explodes, and now gas is now flowing toward the flames.
  • The plane is about to blow up, Marion’s trapped inside, and Indy is being beaten senseless as deadly propellers whirl over his head.

All they wanted to do was get on the plane! To me, this is a pitch-perfect example of how to create drama: a simple goal, and things relentlessly going wrong. This is the good kind of obstacle-stacking: the kind that gets your readers turning pages, forsaking sleep, missing appointments, and alienating loved ones.

But there’s a different kind of obstacle-stacking, which is neither dramatic nor gripping. I’m talking about the obstacles people set in front of them when they plan to start writing. Here’s an example, which is completely fictional and totally not from my own life, especially not from earlier this week.

  • A hypothetical author (TOTALLY NOT ME) gets up, plans to do some writing.
  • But first, better check email. And blogs. And Twitter.
  • One can’t write on an empty stomach, so breakfast time. Better make it as complicated as possible.
  • Oops, just got another email because I didn’t turn off my email client. I mean he didn’t. Oh, screw it.
  • I need coffee. I have to wash the coffee pot and filter because I didn’t do it last night.
  • Is it dark in here? I better adjust the shades. Now it’s too bright. Now it’s too dim. Now it’s too bright again.
  • Better clean this desk off too. A dirty desk is the sign of a dirty — coffee’s done! Oops, too much cream. Now not enough. Now too much again. Now I spilled hot coffee on my crotch. Time for several minutes of screaming and worrying about my future offspring, followed by laundry triage.
  • Okay, NOW I’m ready — maybe I should read a few more blogs, you know, for inspiration. Inspiration to do what, you ask? Look, nobody likes a wise-ass.
  • The cat needs attention. Well I can’t neglect the cat, that would make me some sort of monster!
  • And I don’t want the other cat to get jealous, so…
  • Now to spend ten minutes finding just the right piece of music.
  • All right. I’m finally all set! Everything’s perfect and —
  • Now my coffee’s cold.
  • You know, it’s almost lunch, I’ll catch up this afternoon.
  • Ad infinitum, up to and including social obligations, TV series, the gym, the laundry, the telephone, the doorbell, and so on.

If this looks like textbook procrastination, that’s because it is. But that’s what procrastination amounts to: stacking obstacles between you and your writing. Sometimes they’re perfectly legitimate circumstances that come up. Sometimes they’re just situations you make up. Life will make it hard enough for you to write without you helping.

I still struggle with the urge to wait for the “perfect” circumstances to write in: the day that I’m well-rested, have big blocks of unbroken time, feel inspired, and meet any number of ephemeral criteria. While these days do happen, they’re like a combination of leap year and Christmas. You can’t depend on them coming along very frequently.

Moving yourself further from the act of writing is drama you don’t need, and no one’s going to find it riveting, least of all you. If you want to create a series of insurmountable obstacles, put them in front of your characters instead. Your readers, and your muse, will thank you.