122: Stuck in the Middle of U
3/20/2023
I don’t remember having ever felt this bad about my writing as I do this morning. I just spent 2 ½ hours starting Chapter 55: Bad Air – Diallo’s and Guma’s descent from the ridge to the marsh below. And it’s left my guts in a twist, feeling ten times worse than I did before I sat down to write. The work is a total mess, a jumble of confused images and ideas that don’t work together. The prose are crap as well. I’m not even sure if it’s at all necessary.
But it’s only Monday, and I have all week to figure it out.
Present-Day Reflection
9/24/2026
Before I start any chapter, I almost always feel good about its potential. Any ideas I might have feel inspired. I enter into it riding this wave of inspiration, full of confidence and excitement about how it could be. While gathering research material, things begin to click into place. Everything seems to be exactly as it should, and all is well.
Then I begin the actual writing and things immediately become less and less certain. I gradually plunge down into the unknown until I reach the bottom of the creative curve—the messy-middle where motivation completely collapses. The initial adrenaline has worn off and the finish line is still so far away. My brain has lost its reference points. I’m too far from the starting line to feel the thrill of its beginning, and too far from the end to taste its completion. This is where despair sets in, where I start to think my work is crap and that I have no idea what I'm doing. The temptation to scrap the whole thing or pivot to a shiny new idea is at its greatest.
To get out of this, I give up on trying to make things perfect. I focus instead on simply finishing. I do whatever it takes to claw my way back to a point where I feel good about the work again. I stitch the broken pieces together and eventually I start seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. As the final structure solidifies, confidence returns – not naive excitement as in the beginning, but as a hard-earned satisfaction. I find that the chapter actually holds together, and my pride in its execution takes over.
It always feels like a personal failure when I’m stuck there at the bottom of the U in this kind of Creative Curve – that point where the entire Batu saga feels doomed. It helps though to remember that this low point isn’t a detour from the creative process, it is the process.
