Someone on my reading list asked for advice on what to do when you think of yourself as a writer, but you've lost the desire or need to write. And I ended up writing a 5+1 post in reply, and I've seen this question come up again and again, so here is a list of things that helped drag me out of my years-long writing slump and that I start looking at these days if I feel like I'm landing in one again. These are not answers, these are "things that it might be helpful to try". Maybe it will be useful to someone?

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1. If you really don't want to write anymore, then don't worry about it. You are a writer if you have written, and sometimes life or brain chemistry or whatever turns off the desire/ability for awhile, and that's ok, and it's ok even if it doesn't come back ever. (Either Mur Lafferty or Ursula Vernon - I forget which - recently said a thing about how the world has plenty of writing, the world does not have plenty of People With Their Shit Together, so if you get to pick one and only one of those, you will be doing the world a greater service if you pick the latter. That's good wisdom, if those are options you've got.)

2. If you want to still feel like A Writer but don't want to write, you can decide you're recharging, or building up life experience to use in books later, or being a diarist instead of a novelist right now, or whatever. This old post on writing exercises includes a lot of things I do, and frame or reframe as being about writing, to feel like a writer even when I haven't been adding words to stories. Reminding yourself that you're progressing even if you aren't getting words on page can help loosen up the words, too.

3. Read things that make you want to write - I find that I'm most excited about writing original fic when I'm reading a lot of original stuff in the same genre, most excited about writing fanfic when I'm reading a lot of fanfic, most excited about making comics when I'm reading a lot of comics, and least excited about writing fiction in general when I'm reading things that are not a kind of book I want to write. For me, specifically, the best to get me writing is stuff that's almost what I want but not quite, there's something very wrong with it, and then I get inspired to write my stories to fix it, dammit.

4. If you've been trying to write toward certain stories, drop them and just let yourself write silly pointless things instead. When I have a lot of WIPs I'm trying to be serious about and have a lot invested in and then lose my joy in writing, sometimes letting myself just forget the wips, and write drabbles or ficlet memes or dirty limericks, or just noodle on something that I know will never be a good story, helps loosen up the muscles and remind me of why I want to do this. (For some people, words-a-day-of-freewriting goals can help with this, for some people it just makes it worse.)

5. Spend more time alone in your head with yourself. Especially in this era, it's really easy to constantly surround yourself with podcasts and radio and books and blogs and so on. And without even realizing it, you don't have any time left in your days for your stories to speak to you. And that doesn't give them enough soil to grow enough to want to be written. I personally find I never want to write as much as when I'm doing long walks every day with nothing else to listen to, but other ways of getting time alone with your thoughts can work too - putting the book away at night before you're tired enough to sleep or setting the alarm half an hour early to lie quietly in bed, coloring books, yoga, spinning, actual meditation, woodcarving, Lego, twiddly phone games, staring out the bus window or coffeeshop window, whatever. Just turn off the podcasts and the TV and shut down the socializing while you're doing it, and try to listen to the stories in your head instead, and maybe the the stories will start trying to get out again. (If being alone in your head is really bad for you right now, don't try this. See above about having shit at least marginally together being always more important than writing.)

+1. Last-ditch desperation move: hack your brain chemistry. By that I do NOT mean 'go off the meds that are keeping you functional' or, gods forbid, 'become Ernest Hemingway'. But humans have a specific brain system for modelling what other humans do - it helps us be social animals - and when it goes into overdrive, that's when the stories start bursting out of every pore. And sometimes it just stops working the way it used to, and it's a brain thing, not a mental thing, and if you really need your stories back, you might have to look at what might have changed the way your brain is operating at the hardware level. And sometimes it's something you can't fix (like a chronic illness) or something that is absolutely worth trading your stories for (like parenting a small child, or not being clinically depressed anymore).

But, especially if you really need your stories back and nothing else will work, it's worth looking at the little things, like: has your caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, or other recreational drug consumption changed? Have your sleep patterns changed? Your eating habits? Your exercise habits? The amount and color of light you're exposed to? Stress levels? Cuddling allowance? Socialization? General background noise? Humidity and temperature? All those background physical-body things that can change our mood without us noticing can also screw with writing mojo, and even if you can't get them back to where they were when you were last writing, you can look for things you can tweak to try to compensate. And if you absolutely have to finish a story THIS WEEK, sometimes you can find hacks that will jumpstart the writing even if you don't want to make them a lifestyle choice. Me personally, I have learned from experiment that reproducibly and independent of all other factors, the stories stop flowing when I'm caffeinated, and they go into overdrive when I'm chronically sleep-deprived without benefit of stimulant.


...and if you tried all of those and still got nowhere, I'm tapped out. Anybody else have anything that's worked?