Walking and Writer's Block by Elizabeth Musser

I remember the giddy, gleeful way I awoke each morning that fall after I received my first contract to write a novel. I could hardly concentrate on getting the boys off to school, such was my excitement of having three hours of freedom to let my fingers dance across the keyboard of our ten-year-old IBM computer. Three hours to write! It seemed my mind had been saving up for this opportunity for a lifetime. Indeed the stories had run around in my head every since I was a small girl. They had been scribbled into spiral notebooks and journals and on the backs of napkins and along the side of my ‘to-do’ lists. More recently, they’d been typed in hurried shorthand intelligible only to me, before little hands could reach and plunk at the ‘delete’ button. All these years of stories. At last a contract! A dream come true.

As I have often said, those first months and years before my computer each morning were like a huge hug from the Lord. He was allowing me to do what I felt I had been created to do. The ideas tumbled out so quickly. I put all of my knowledge into that first novel. Who knew if I’d ever get another contract? And as I wrote, I thought smugly to myself, “What is all this talk about writer’s block? I have so many ideas, I can’t possibly exhaust them. I’ll never suffer from that!”

But months and years went by with the inevitable frustrations that come with the writer’s career. The sales aren’t what I’d hoped, the publisher is bought out by another who is not interested in my books, the contract doesn’t come, the rest of life crowds into my imagination so that worry replaces creativity, sickness sneaks up and depression whispers. Suddenly all creativity seems to come to a screeching halt.

Then writer’s block hovers above the blank computer screen, taunting me with phrases like “Little Miss know-it-all. Thought you were so great. You’ll never write another thing!” Whatever the voices, they scream loudly.

I have learned in these past 13 years of writing novels that, just as in my Christian life I need a battle plan to turn to in moments of discouragement, I also need a plan when writer’s block engulfs me. Here it is: When I’m stuck, I walk. It is as simple as that.

Wherever we have moved across the globe, I have asked the Lord for one simple thing: a place to walk around the block. A little snatch of green and beauty to inspire me. He has always answered, whether it was the green hills behind the government housing apartment I lived in during my first years in France or the path beside the wide Saône River that welcomes me now on my daily walks.

I walk. Why? Walking does a whole lot of things for me.

It provides me with an uninhibited time to talk with the Lord. I cry out to Him, tell Him the way seems too hard, the journey too steep. The story is not coming. My heart is too heavy to concentrate. I pour out my heart to Him and then I walk and watch and praise Him for what I see around me.

Next I ask Him for inspiration. Often I’ve been sitting at my desk for several hours, and I am getting sleepy. The scene I’m working on is just not coming. I push back the chair, stretch, crack my back and go for a walk. I talk out loud to myself, letting my characters converse and argue. When I get a good idea, I repeat it again and again in my head, so that it stays in my memory until I get home and type it into the computer.

Sometimes, I have inspiration for several scenes, but I don’t have time to write them all out. Kids are coming home from school, dinner needs to be fixed, some interruption is right around the corner. I quickly type out the ideas with phrases that will jar my memory the next time I sit at the computer. Then I can come back and remember what God revealed on my walk. If inspiration comes and I simply cannot get to the computer to type it out, I scribble a few phrases into the small spiral notebook I carry with me most everywhere I go.

Walking for me is a right brain activity and so when I return from my walk, I am not trying to write a polished scene. I am putting down the ideas that flowed through my imagination. One thing I enjoy about walking is that I can create conversation as I walk. Doubtless, many a fellow walker or jogger has seen my mouth moving as I talk to no one and thought I was crazy. But the truth is—other than the fact that I am crazy—that outside in the rain or sun or snow I find it easier to talk out loud and create snippets of conversation. If the snippet is especially profound, I sometimes try to memorize it until I can write it down.

When I was writing my new novel, Searching for Eternity, I came to a snag in the story and for weeks and months I did not know how the story would end. I continued to do my research and put the facts down on the computer. But I struggled. Many, many walks found me arguing back and forth with myself about possible endings. Then one day, out of the blue, I just knew what was right. It helped that parts of my story took place in Lyon, near the very river by which I was walking.

Now it’s time to plan a scene for a new novel and, you guessed it, the outdoors is beckoning. So I must be on my way. But I leave you with this advice: when suffering from writer’s block, walk!

To read a review of Searching for Eternity click HERE.