Some days are better than others. Others, though, straight-up suck.
Since May I’ve been on a spurt of working on my Secret New Novel four mornings a week. That’s four days when I get up, eat breakfast, and then dive into the novel until around lunchtime. On the one hand, this has helped me get a LOT of words down on the page, but it also causes issues on days when I’m Just. Not. Feeling. It.
I wrote about this a few years back in a post about what I do when I don’t feel like working, but I want to reflect on this problem again because I’ve been spending far more hours a week in the creative realm than I was previously. Because I’m setting myself up to spend more time writing per week, it’s more likely that a Bad Day will fall on a writing day and interfere with my creative process more than it would interfere with, say, my ability to schedule bill payments or or do a repetitive Day Job task.
These problems arise on days when I’m feeling some degree of depressed, but also on days when I haven’t slept well, I’m worried about something, or I have a lot going on. I’ve found myself handling these problems in a variety of ways, so I thought I’d list a few of them here…
When A Bad Day Happens, You Have Options
Take The Morning Off
To be fair, I haven’t actually done this yet this summer, but it’s something I could do if things got really rough. If I woke up feeling like absolute garbage and needed a mental health day, the last thing I’d want to be doing is sitting down to work on a creative project. This is exactly the same thing I’d do if I were physically sick with a cold or the flu. Instead, I’d stay in bed, watch TV, read, or just gather my thoughts until I felt ready to enter the working world—which would be far better than pushing those feelings aside and fighting through them so they could haunt me later.
Sleep In Just a Little
On mornings when I’m not feeling it, I’ll stay in bed for an extra hour or so—not too long, but just long enough to recover some lost sleep and gather my thoughts a bit. I find that putting less pressure on myself to start the day helps me relax and work through some of what’s bothering me, so that when I do get up, its with a renewed sense of vigor, and the extra hour was well spent.
Work On Something Other Than Writing
I’ve been choosing this option on days when I’m feeling particularly worried by a deadline, or my other work isn’t going the way I’d like it to. In these cases when my stress level is rising, I find I can concentrate 1,000% better if I take care of the unfinished problem that’s stressing me out first, then handle writing the next day. Usually, I’ll make the decision to cancel a morning writing session the day before, so I can mentally prepare myself. On these days I regret nothing, but I just hope they don’t come too often.
I will say that if I could manage my time and schedule perfectly, this wouldn’t ever happen—but because I’m human, it does. The trick is to just make it happen as rarely as possible.
Spend Some Time Reading
I often start my writing sessions by sitting down in front of my office bookshelf for a few minutes (as in, literally on the floor) and doing a little reading—maybe a novel that’s relevant to my current project, or maybe a favorite book that stirs me in ways that can skyrocket my motivation. On Bad Days, though, I try reading longer, maybe for a half hour or a full hour, in an attempt to get myself into a stronger frame of mind. When this works, it really works: as in, I’ll leap away from the book ready to write with a new sense of exhilaration.
Some days, though, it doesn’t quite work. On these days, after reading I try…
Sitting at the Desk and Writing What I Can
Any writer knows the feeling of sitting down at the desk and feeling distracted, discouraged, and foggy-headed, when the words simply aren’t coming. I’ve heard a lot of writers say that on these days, you should sit down at the desk anyway just to stay in the habit, so you can train your body to be attuned to the writing process rather than taking time off and losing momentum.
Trying to write when I’m really not feeling it is still an experiment in progress for me. On the one hand, I’m seeing the benefits in that I can at least get a few hundred words written (600 or so over two and a half hours the last time I tried), though the stuff I am writing is clearly bad and will need to be drastically revised later.
Just once, though, when things were going rough I’ve tried a different tactic, and that is…
Sitting at the Desk and Writing to a Word Count, No Matter How Long it Takes
This summer I haven’t been using a set word count when I write, but my ballpark average is 1,000 words or more per morning. I recently read an excellent productivity guide called The Organised Writer [sic, the author’s British!] where Antony Johnston sets the firm advice of sitting down to make your word quota every single day, no matter how long it takes.
This seemed like an interesting tactic and a good way to stay on track, especially if I could get my writing momentum back during the session. I tried this a few days ago when I woke up feeling lousy, but let me tell you, it was rough.
I found myself feeling frustrated because I was forcing myself to make a quota, and also discouraged because I was sitting at the computer for such a long time knowing that I wasn’t moving any closer to my goal. I found myself thinking about all the other things I could have been doing that morning if I’d just taken a writing day off, and found myself questioning Johnston’s system. Don’t get me wrong, I made my 1,000 words—but they weren’t good words, they took until well after my usual lunchtime, and they put me in an odd mood moving into the afternoon that I was fortunately able to get out of later.
We All Have Bad Days, and We Should Develop Strategies for Handling Them
As you can see, I’m still playing with ways of handling my own Bad Days, and am choosing different strategies depending on the day as I come to know my own limits and habits. I’ll probably try The Organised Writer method of writing to a word count no matter what again, and who knows, it might even be easier the second or third time. What’s most important, though, is knowing what kind of Bad Day you’re having, and how to handle it so you can refresh your mental state as quickly as possible and maybe even get some work done.
If you have a way of handling Bad Days that I haven’t mentioned, let me know in the comments! I’m always looking for new ideas, and sharing always helps :-)