I’ve been in a serious writing funk lately. It’s been rough. I haven’t been getting my normal word counts in, and I’m getting irritated with it. The thing is… I can’t pin it down to just one reason. There’s a lot of them. Here’s some:

Part of it was the kids being out of school for the summer. That always screws with my writing schedule. I love my children, but having them home all the time without any kind of break makes me crazy and kills my writing mojo.

Another reason is my grandpa died recently, and while I don’t feel like I’m affected by it, I know that I am. I can feel the difference in myself. It’s hard to explain, but the simple fact is that I miss him. I wasn’t that close, but I still miss him.

The third thing is that I’m in my graduating quarter. It’s my last three months of school, and I’m busy getting my portfolio ready, even though now that the writing is taking off, it’s looking like I may not use the degree in the job market.

All of this led to one thing: I wasn’t writing.

In the last two weeks, my word count has been abysmal. And I just couldn’t muster up the capability to write, even though I would sit down and try. I’ve never had this problem before. I always power through blocks like this.

I don’t believe in writer’s block.

I never have. That’s why I power through blocks, because it’s just my mind tricking me, or trying to tell me something important. But this block wasn’t a creative block. It was an emotional one, which I think is far worse, because then you WANT to write, but the words won’t cooperate. For me, the creative blocks are usually something wrong with the story and I don’t want to rewrite parts to get the story moving again. Easy (theoretically) fix.

Enter Write or Die.

So, this weekend, I dug out my copy of Write or Die Desktop Edition. I set my goal for 250 words in 10 minutes and just wrote. My first 10 minutes, I wrote over 500 words. I was encouraged by this, and the words somehow managed to flow some more.

The thing was… Write or Die isn’t always that effective for me. I have this thing with deadlines. I like to rebel. So often timed sprints kind of have this adverse effect on me. But this time, because my focus has been everywhere but on the writing, it helped to sit down and take ten minutes to just write. I never do longer than ten minutes, because my attention still wanders if the sprints are too long.

But at least I’m writing again.

And my disposition has much improved in the last couple of days since I have. Now the words I did on Heart and Snow the first couple of days? Yeah, I’m probably about to trash them, but I think that their purpose was only to get me writing again, and now that I’m in a groove, I’ll go back and write the right words for that story.

Luckily, I’m still on track to get Heart and Snow out in time for the holidays in the fall/winter, even if I start over.

I can do this.

What’s your favorite way to bust a creative block? Or even an emotional one? How do you deal with those days when you just can’t get those words on the page?