In between the Plateaus

This likely won’t endear me to anyone who has trouble getting words on the page, but writer’s block has never been a problem for me. Even as a kid drawing cartoons at the dining room table, you’d never find me staring at a blank page. By the time I was sitting there with a biro in hand, my imagination had been bubbling over to schizophrenic degrees for at least an hour prior. If I’ve been gifted with anything in this life, it’s this ability to improvise and follow a creative thread that as far as I can tell is invisible to most (there’s probably an interesting examination around what makes one person decide to write vs another to be had here. But I’ll put a pin in this for now).

Sure, I’ll have moments where I’m struggling to see movement on my “big” project of the moment, but I make a point to juggle enough varieties of writing at any given time to allow me to pivot when one of my forks in the fire isn’t giving off any heat. As a result I rarely go a day where I can’t access some type of creative output.

This is a fantastic system for feeling productive, but as for translating to actual results across longer timescales? It can be dangerous.

The instinct to play in the zone of competency is human. Once you’ve mastered a certain fluency at a thing, you want to enjoy the fruits of your hard work. After hours fretting away in your bedroom, when you finally get up on stage you want to disappear into an improvised guitar solo and keep following the music to where ever it takes you. You want to do all the things that look impressive, do the things that a younger version of yourself would have been blown away by. Which is fine to indulge in in moments. You earned that. But if you never slow down for a minute and figure out how to keep up with the changing chords or key modulations your band is never going to move beyond songs in 4/4 with a bit of pentatonic noodling.

That’s where I am with my writing at the moment.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about literary style. While the world’s been feeding on a diet of tariffs, Gaza and Ukraine, I’ve been swallowing down deeply niche, technical, nerd doses of craft theory. The type of shit that makes you real fun to talk to at a party. There’s an article I’ve been tinkering with for over six months outlining some of this craft chat that I’ve buried myself in, but I keep changing it as my depth of understanding grows and the magnifying glass gets held over the rudimentary understanding of sentence structure that I’ve been coasting on for years.

This has caused the closest thing to writers’ block I’ve encountered in years. I’m in a limbic phase where I’m suddenly “seeing” more advanced technique (or the absence of) in the things I read, but I’m yet to integrate this into my own technique enough to apply it in my own work. I don’t speak any other language, but I imagine this is equivalent to being able to understand French yet not speak it.

This hasn’t resulted in a struggle to get words on a page for me. It’s a question of how satisfied I am with the things I have written. If you’d asked me six weeks ago how developed I felt my writing voice was and how distinct a rhythm my sentences carry, I would have given you a much more glowing review than the one I’d provide this morning.

Of course this is a case of learning-how-little-you-know by digging into the craft in more depth, but I thought it was worth marking down a few notes regarding this stage of development while I’m wallowing in the middle of it.

I’m sure some people would call this writer’s block. But it’s not that. This is just the dip in the graph of skill development. By forcing myself off the plateau, I’ve sent myself out into limbo for the foreseeable future. I’m in the get-worse-to-get-better window, which is a shit place to exist in while you’re in it, but that’s the game I’ve decided to play.

Perhaps this is an unhealthy, overly progress minded perspective to hold, but as far as I can tell, by the time I get back to a place of comfort in my own writing style, I’ll only be able to rest there for a little while anyway. Because the moment you’ve realised you’re on a plateau is the cue to jump off and look for the next one.

Ps.

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