The best advice I\u2019ve got for you right now is to lean back and wait, because normally the joy and interest will come back. Being a writer, and having enjoyed and been interested in it previously, isn\u2019t something that goes away all that easily. The set of behaviors that make up being a writer are complex and difficult to ingrain\u2026 which is going to make the ability to do this kind of work difficult to lose even if you were trying <\/i>to do so. So, first of all: take heart.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It has to be said that, human nature and psychology (and nature itself) being the cranky intransigent things they sometimes are, it may (paradoxically) be necessary for your recovery of your joy and interest in the work to completely surrender to the concept that you might actually have permanently lost it. I know this sounds counterintuitive, but the effectiveness of simply giving up<\/i> is sometimes surprising.\u00a0 There\u2019s a saying attributed to Carl Jung, the father of the concept of Archetype as we now understand it, that goes like this: \u201cWhat you resist, persists; and not only does it persist, but it gets bigger in size.\u201d (There\u2019s a good long article about this concept over here in Psychology Today<\/a>: worth looking at. \u2026Though I also have to say that the illo at the top is hilarious and perfect, because Kylo Ren should frankly be the poster child for the whole idea.)<\/p>\n My own experience suggests that there are times when as soon as you give up,<\/i> the thing that\u2019s been eluding you either collapses to the ground where you can just stroll over and reclaim it, or turns around and runs headlong into your arms. Frustrating, but what can you do? When the whole point is to get whatever it is back, <\/i>the idea that it played you a little in the process will after the fact seem less of an issue.<\/p>\n Possible causes for what\u2019s going on with you are worth touching on briefly. As regards the “Law of Undulations” above: as much as I love him, there would be a lot of things that Clive and I would disagree about, but this wouldn\u2019t be one of them. I think he was really onto something.<\/p>\n With the Law in mind, while you\u2019re working on what \u201cgiving up\u201d might look like \u2013 assuming you need to go that far \u2013 here are some possibly similar situations and strategies to consider.<\/p>\n Some of the above situations come with suggestions of possible things you can do about them. But do not underestimate the power of simply waiting a while and not doing anything.<\/i> It\u2019s worth emphasizing that in our culture as it stands at the moment, there\u2019s endless emphasis on immediately DOING THINGS<\/i> to fix what ails you. Sometimes not <\/i>doing anything is more effective \u2013 though to some people that\u2019s going to sound heretical, and you\u2019ll run the risk of being accused of laziness (not least by the back of your own mind, once it realizes you\u2019re onto something that\u2019s going to give you back control of the situation. The self-sabotaging wiliness of a subconscious about to lose its advantage can be a terrifying thing\u2026 but even that loses some of its terrors when your conscious mind suspects or knows what it\u2019s up to.) Anyway, ignore that noise.<\/p>\n Give doing nothing <\/i>a good long chance. Stoke up on your reading. Get caught up on TV and movies if that\u2019s your thing. Do other work. Create something that isn\u2019t <\/i>writing. (Cooking\u2019s good for this. I love <\/i>being responsible for mighty successes or godawful failures in the kitchen and knowing that the critics at Kirkus and PW are not going to give the slightest<\/i> damns about it.)<\/p>\n But tl:dr; Don\u2019t despair: just kick back and wait. <\/b><\/i>And see how it goes.<\/p>\n \u2026And eventually let me know how you get on. \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 HTH.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n And also:<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n The last few months, nothing has seemed to go right. What do you do, when it seems like it\u2019s never going to get better?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Well, the short answer is: I just keep going. It\u2019s rarely fun, but it seems to work. (A note here: the following is all going to be quite subjective, so feel free to tl:dr out of it at any time.) \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Per the Law of Undulations above: It’s been my experience in the past that sometimes these nothing-goes-right periods have to do with one aspect or another of this Law, especially in terms of one\u2019s own perception of what\u2019s going on around them.<\/p>\n When you\u2019re in one of the \u201cdry\u201d or bottomed-out periods described, it\u2019s easy to perceive everything as screwed up, indeed a long if not seemingly never-ending string of screwups. The only way to handle this particular situation (for me anyway) is to outlast it, and to work consciously<\/i> at outlasting it. No one else needs to know this is what you\u2019re working at. You just joggle your own elbow daily and remind yourself that this is something cyclic, and can be lived through to the other side.<\/p>\n The other possibility, of course, is that you\u2019re passing through one of those strange situational pockets in a human life when the probabilities of existence do seem, however irrationally, to have stopped functioning in your favor at all.<\/i> How one manages this situation is, I think, going to be at least partially affected by one\u2019s own take on why things happen in the world, and what your relationship is with (a) the world and (b) whatever you think might be responsible for the way it acts.<\/p>\n My own attitudes in this regard vary unpredictably along a wide spectrum ranging from the straightforwardly mathematical \u2013 i.e., luck is an illusion and any conceivable hostility of the universe doubly so \u2013 and right down at the other end, the opinion of King Clode in Thurber\u2019s sweet, brief fairytale The White Deer, <\/i>which is \u201cEverything is aimed<\/em> at me.\u201d*<\/p>\n In either case, I find myself falling back on something I think of personally as the Duty To Just Keep Breathing.<\/p>\n In every life there are people who depend on you and circumstances that need you to keep doing what you normally do, no matter how much you feel like just sitting down and slumping into a heap, or rolling yourself into a Duvet Burrito and not coming out until things change. This normally turns out to be counterproductive in the long run. So in these circumstances I just remind myself of the Duty To Keep Breathing and Doing What Needs Done. This is one of the best kinds of heroism, I think \u2013 one of the quiet kinds that because they so routinely fly under the radar just aren\u2019t acknowledged often enough.<\/p>\n Not that I would ever consider myself at all heroic for this kind of dogged persistence, you understand; but when I see other people exercising it, I know them for the heroes they are. It is so hard <\/i><\/strong>sometimes to push on, just keep on keeping on, especially when no one else seems to understand what you\u2019re going through, and nothing you do seems to make any difference.\u00a0 But after the fact, when the bad spell breaks, when things finally stop going wrong, you get to look back on how you hung on and know that you really did something good there. And that\u2019s strength you will carry forward with you into better times.<\/p>\n There\u2019s one other thing I use to help me stick it out, sometimes. It\u2019s kind of funny, actually, because the phrasing of the verse in question is so grand, but it works for me. A writer named William Dale Jennings wrote a short lovely book called The Ronin <\/a><\/i>\u2013 \u201ca novel based on a Zen myth\u201d, is how it\u2019s described \u2013 and at the beginning of it he quotes the great Chinese philosopher and Confucianist Meng-tse (the name is sometimes rendered in Japanese as Moshi). I don\u2019t know if this translation of the lines in question is original with him, but it seems to have got around. It goes this way:<\/p>\n\n
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