The Writer’s Block Post or How I Yeet the Yips
I’ve been running this writing blog for the better part of a decade, and not once have I really covered writer’s block. Quite the oversight; I know. Do you even write, bro? In this post, I will talk about the aforementioned writer’s worst nightmare, but only my personal experience with it. You see, I think writer’s block is kind of a catchall terms for a wide array of conditions that goes beyond the simple “I can’t write.” It’s manifestations are as varied as the authors it plagues. So what you’re going to read here is what my writer’s block looks like and how I deal with it. Hopefully, that’ll be helpful to some of you, but I’m not gonna lie, there’s some big time catharsis going on here. 🙂
The condition that most resembles my form of writer’s block is more often found in professional sports. It’s called the yips. Essentially, what the yips does is make it impossible or very difficult to do something you’ve done as naturally as breathing for years. For example, a pitcher who gets the yips might suddenly not be able to throw the ball over the plate, something he’s been doing reliably for decades. The yips tend to come on suddenly, out of the blue, and thought it’s causes are varied, it generally results in you psyching yourself out before you even start. You BELIEVE you won’t be able to throw the ball over the plate, or dribble the basketball, or, you know, write a coherent and compelling sentence, so all of those activities get exponentially more difficult.
The first time I had the writing yips was in October of 2020. I’m sure you remember what was going on that year. The pandemic and lockdown was not exactly awesome for those of us prone to brain weasel infestations (I have OCD, so my mind is pretty much a brain weasel’s natural habitat). In addition to enduring a once-in-a-century global pandemic, my dumb ass decided to throw buying a house and moving into the mix. To say I was stressed out would be the understatement of the millennia. But, hey, we didn’t get Covid, we made it through the move safe and sound, and I thought everything was okay. Nope! In early October, I took part in the biweekly one-hour flash fiction challenge I’ve been doing for ten years. Normally, I can look at the prompt and pound out a thousand words of pretty decent flash fiction in around forty-five minutes. This time? Complete brain lock. It took me ten minutes to come up with something resembling an idea. and then I wrote in fits and starts for the next fifty, finishing with a godawful, disjointed mess. It scared the shit out of me. This had never happened before. The words were always just there, the vaunted flow attainable almost instantly with first word to blank page. This time, I felt like I was thinking through mud, trying to push square pegs through round holes. In short, it sucked.
After the disastrous writing challenge, I thought, hey, it’s an isolated incident. I was just stressed out. Next time I try to write, it’ll be fine. Unfortunately, it was too late and the yips and its army of rabid brain weasels was already at work on my worn-out psyche. The next time I sat down to write. Same thing. The words didn’t come, the sentences looked and felt like shit, and I spent hours getting more and more worked up until I was a frazzled, anxious mess. Now the brain weasels really went to work. What if you’ve lost the ability to write altogether? They whispered, and then, gleefully, they pushed me onto a catastrophic carnival ride. You’re gonna miss deadlines and never be able to finish that novel and you’re gonna have to tell people that you’ve lost it and slink away in shame never to show your face AGAIN! God, brain weasels are assholes. So, with these lovely thoughts running rampant in my brain, writing became tougher and tougher. The yips fucking had me. Every blank page induced feelings of sick panic, and the brain weasels worried my gray matter like a dog with a chew toy.
How did I survive my writing yips? I did a thing that is so alien to my writing process, I might as well have gone to the moon. What I did was GASP! take a break. I correctly identified the source of my yips as the layered effect of multiple stressful situations. But now I was in a safe place where those stressors were either gone or vastly reduced, so I could take a breath and let my emotional and creative batteries recharge. I took about a week off from writing, and then when I came back, I started slowly. I just wrote microfiction. Those little fifty-word stories were an easily attainable goal. Even if I was still feeling stuck, I could get something out, and feel like I’d accomplished something. Then, when I shared the micros on social media, the likes and positive feedback was a much needed shot of validation. About a week later, it was time for the next biweekly flash challenge, and as terrified as I was about totally locking up, I wasn’t going to miss it. When the hour started, I sat for five minutes thinking about a concept, and then I started writing. It was tough for the first few minutes and then it happened. The walls tumbled down, the words gushed out, and my fingers flew across the keyboard on a direct line to my thoughts. I was in the motherfucking flow, and it felt wonderful. What I wrote that day was maybe not my absolute best work, but the way I wrote it banished the yips and its brain weasels to the outer dark never to return . . .
Or so I thought. 🙂
Yeah, I’m dealing with the yips again. Like last time, it’s a combination of real life stresses that have conspired to render me pretty useless behind the keyboard. You might now be thinking, “Hey, aren’t you writing like a whole blog post right now?” Yes, I am, and this is an specific feature of my personal version of the writing yips. It only seems to affect me when I’m writing narrative fiction. Who knows why. Blog posts, gaming articles, stuff like that, while maybe not as easy as they are when I’m not yipping, I can still bang them out pretty reliably. It also doesn’t seem to affect me as much when I’m writing media tie-in. It’s tougher, but I can still get it done. Deadlines have a wonderful way of forcing you to get your shit together. 🙂
This current round of yips started in the exact same way as the last. About a month ago, I got stuck on a story in the biweekly flash fiction challenge and that ballooned into The Great Brain Weasel Jamboree, Part Two: The Gnawing. It sucks, and I’m dealing with a lot of the same shit I dealt with in 2020. So what am I gonna do? Same thing as last time. I’m gonna take a break, and then I’m gonna come back slow. I’ll start working on my microfiction miracle cure, and then, when I’m ready, I’ll take part in another flash fiction contest with the hopes that the words will flow, and the yips will become a thing of the past. But even if they don’t, I have conclusive evidence that the yips can be defeated. I’ve done it before. I’ll do it again.
So there you have it, my version of writer’s block, why I get it, and how I deal with it. I don’t have much in the way of specific advice to offer about dealing with your own yips other than they might stem from something outside of your writing. My yips are a symptom of larger issues in my life, and yours may be, too. Identify and deal with those outside issues (nor easy task; I know), and you, too, can yeet the yips. 🙂
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Aeryn, thanks for sharing. Very courageous of you to do so! … I like your strategy for deal with writer’s block. I think we’re all whole people so that what we do in the “real” world affects our writing life and our writing life can feedback into our “real” life too. So, sorting out real life a bit can help clear the decks, as it were, for writing…I also think taking breaks can be really good and can recharge some depleted batteries. Best of luck in your writing this year…and DOWN with those damn Yips!