“You know, there’s nothing in nature that creates all the time.” 

That’s what my friend said to me this summer, and it’s something that has echoed in my soul ever since. We were at a baseball game for our older boys, and she had asked me how writing was going. I told her the truth. That it wasn’t. That for the first time in a long time, I had no ideas, no energy, and no motivation.

I explained to her how story ideas typically worked for me. Usually what happens is that toward the end of writing or editing one book, I’m eager to be done because of another idea that I’m dying to get started on. Ever since high school, when I became serious about becoming a professional novelist, I’ve always either been hard at work on a novel, or I’ve been hard at work AND known, “When I’m done with Book A, I’ll work on Book B.”

But that didn’t happen when I was writing Within These Lines. By the time I was done with it, I felt empty. Like I had left all I had there on those pages.

That’s when my friend said it to me first: “You know, there’s nothing in nature that creates all the time.”

It’s normal to require rest. There’s a rhythm of rest in all of nature, and we’re a part of that. At another time, later in the summer, she reminded me, “You’re not a machine.”

I knew my soul-deep fatigue made sense. I spent 2015-2017 trying to keep Connor, my middle son, seizure free with a very intense medical diet. During those years, I was also pregnant, had a newborn, and then released The Lost Girl of Astor Street.

Then, as we weaned Connor off his diet, and as I finished the first draft of Within These Lines, we learned my father had very aggressive cancer. Like a, “Get your stuff in order because you probably only have a few months to live,” kind of diagnosis. The entire time I worked on edits for Within These Lines, I was also living in fear that these were my last days with my dad. (Fortunately, they were not!)

During the spring of this year and very early summer, I worked to meet my deadlines and simultaneously support my parents. I literally worked on edits in the waiting room at M.D. Anderson (a specialty cancer treatment hospital in Houston, which is not where we live) while my dad underwent an all-day surgery to remove his cancerous mass. Days after learning that the surgery was successful (YAY!) I turned in my final edits to my editor (YAY!)

I was emotionally and creatively exhausted as I came out of both these seasons. All my writing friends assured me that was normal. That I just needed some time off, and I would feel like my creative self again. I knew they were right, but I still had these niggling worries that I would never again have a story idea. That I was done.

But they were all right. This was a winter season for me creatively, and if I wanted to get to the spring, the best thing to do was get some rest. Same as when your body is physically tired. You don’t need to just “push through.” You need to get some sleep!

But how do you rest in a way that encourages the creativity to come back? I fumbled around plenty with this, but now that the season is behind me and I can see it more clearly, here’s what I know was beneficial to me. I hope it will help you if you find yourself in a creative winter.

I cleaned.

I redid the bookshelves in my office. I gathered all my notes from Within These Lines and organized them. I went through office supplies, my computer hard drive, my Google Drive, my desk. All of it. 

Dorky as it may sound, this felt amazing. Cleansing.

I went through all my discarded story ideas.

Like most (maybe all?) writers, I have scads of discarded story ideas. Some are nothing more than a few paragraphs of a plot synopsis, others have several chapters, and many are full drafts.

I went through all I could find and let myself play with each, asking questions like, “What if I took this character from Story A and plopped her into Story B?” Or, “How could I make this contemporary idea into a historical?”

I even landed on an idea that I really liked, and I gave myself a whole day to brainstorm and research what life would’ve been like for a politician’s daughter in Washington D.C. in the 1920s.

I took care of lots of non-writing writing tasks.

Aside from opening up space in my life for a few things that I don’t ordinarily have time for, like training for a half-marathon and refinishing my laundry room, when I wasn’t actively working on a story, I found that I could take care of a lot of the non-writing writing tasks that had been languishing on my list. 

Like researching if it made sense to officially started a business as an author and blogger. (It did.)

Like getting Go Teen Writers moved off of the free platform of Blogger, which was great in 2010, but was limiting us as we grew.

And like re-releasing the Go Teen Writers book, which Jill and I wanted to do now that it was five-years-old, but we had both been so focused on our fiction. 

There have been so many non-writing writing tasks that have piled up on my to-do list because I’ve always prioritized writing. I stand by that choice, but during my creative winter, I had time when I could teach myself new skills, fuss with websites, or paint my laundry room and not feel guilty about the time that I wasn’t writing.  (One could argue that I never need to feel guilty for that, but that’s a different issue of mine that I’m working on.)

I practiced free-writing.

This is an exercise/discipline that I’ve wanted to try out since reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron where she talks about starting the day with “morning pages.” The idea is that you set a timer and you write stream-of-conscious without stopping until the timer goes off. Same as all my cleaning, I found the exercise to be very cleansing. Like I was cleaning out my mind, or something.

I followed my curiosity.

What happened to Japanese immigrants who lived in Hawaii during WWII? What’s the history of the Hawaii islands in general? When was the first school shooting? What’s the history of the U.S. Mexico border? What’s the history of wildfires?

These are all questions that I chased for potential story ideas. Early in my creative winter, as soon as I had the faintest spark of an idea, I turned into Bad Cop. I would haul that fragile creation into a tiny, windowless room, plop it into an uncomfortable chair, and turn one of those awful florescent lights onto it. “How good of an idea are you, really? Do you have what it takes to be an important book? A book that really matters? Am I still going to like you in six months? Will my editor like you? Will my readers like you?”

THAT IS NOT THE WAY TO BRING CREATIVITY BACK.

Ideas need “a safe, warm incubation space” as K. M. Weiland puts it in her post 4 Steps For How To Turn An Idea Into A Story That Rocks.

If you want that story spark to turn into an actual fire, you can’t smother it with lots of judgmental questions. That doesn’t bring forth the best in anything. Instead it’s more about feeding that spark a few more sticks and saying, “Here you go. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

I kept my eyes open and took notes.

I overheard an odd conversation at the airport, and I wrote it down.

On a morning run, I noticed a decaying building that was once a country club; I jotted it down as a possible setting.

I read several books that were written with a dual timeline. That could be fun.

I reread favorite craft books and stories, and I listened to lots of new stuff too. I didn’t know if any of these notes would amount to a story, but I took them anyway.

I trusted that it would come back.

There have been a few other times when I’ve lacked creative motivation. When I was studying for finals, when I was planning a wedding, when I had babies, when I had the flu, etc.  The desire to create would slip away for a time, and then it would come back.

There were times during my creative winter when I literally said out loud to myself, “It’ll come back. It always comes back.”

There was no forcing it to come back. Nothing on that list above made my desire to tell stories return. My agent and I had a 45-minute phone conversation where she threw different thoughts and ideas at me. I just kept saying, “I don’t know … I don’t know … I don’t know.”

And then finally, a few weeks after that, spring arrived.

I had one of those days where I was carrying paper around with me because the story just kept unfolding in my head, and I wanted to capture all my thoughts. When I sent the blurb to my agent, she called and gushed over how fantastic she thought it was. “Where did this idea come from?”

The truth was too convoluted to go into, because I could see how I had picked up little pieces of it all creative winter long.

That research about a politician’s daughter back when I was reviewing old ideas.

How I’d been curious about the history of school shootings.

The dilapidated country club I ran by.

Those dual timeline books that I had wanted to try for myself.

Even the epic “I don’t know” conversation, when my agent had suggested something set in Kansas, maybe even something involving Native Americans.

Somehow all of that melded into a book idea. (If it gets published, I’ll definitely need a better answer for, “Where did you get the idea for this book?” because that won’t work in an interview! But you guys will know the real story.)

If you’re in a creative winter, I promise you that it’s just a season. Nothing in nature can create all the time, not even you. You’re not a machine. Stay curious, keep your eyes open, keep hope alive, and maybe take care of a few non-writing writing tasks while you’re waiting.

Spring is coming.

Have you ever been in a creative winter? What helped you get back to writing?