Writer's block and incubation theory

If you watch a kettle boil when making a cup of tea, you’ll notice three things. First, it’s boring, and you feel like you’re wasting time. Second, time itself seems to slow down, right before it boils. It’s as if those pesky water molecules need an extra kicking to get them to dance around more and actually boil. Third, it goes quiet before it actually boils. The calm before the storm. There’s a fourth thing, too. If you think, ‘to hell with it, it’s hot enough’, and decide to make the tea anyway without letting the water boil, it won’t taste as good.

What’s this got to do with writing and writer’s block?

Everything.

Sometimes writing flows from your fingertips. I’m writing a new book, and the prologue and first ten chapters just fell from the keys on my laptop. Bliss. Then I hit chapter eleven. I wrote three pages and… stopped. I haven’t typed another word for two weeks. Writer’s block. 

Am I afraid? 

Nope.

As a psychologist, I studied how creativity works at university. There’s something called incubation theory. Great scientists didn’t sit down one day and say, ‘I’m going to write a universe-shattering theory today.’ They’d learn everything they could, think about it until they were going crazy, and then one day, out of the blue, they’d suddenly see the answer. What was interesting is that most of these scientists had the same ‘kettle’ experience of supposedly dead time, where they weren’t learning anything knew. Like the water molecules, the neurons in their brains just needed more time to re-group, to re-align to see things from a slightly different perspective, and then, hey presto, time to write that Nobel prize-winning paper.  

Back to writer’s block. What’s holding me back on chapter eleven? Basically the original way forward I had in mind isn’t singing to me anymore. I need to write something better. But I can’t / won’t write until I see that new way forward.

Some people say you should write every day, e.g. 500 or 1000 words. Doesn’t work for me. I only write when I have something to say. Otherwise I feel I’m teaching myself to write badly.

So, what do I do? Do I watch the kettle boil? Yes, and no. I sit, sometimes for a couple of hours, trying to work out a way forward, making illegible notes on small pieces of paper. Seriously, my handwriting is that bad. It doesn’t matter, because this is process, not product. I’m banging my head against this literary wall in my mind, trying to break through, so it doesn’t matter if I can’t decipher the notes later.

And I read. Same genre, someone I aspire to, though that doesn’t mean I want to copy them. And I do other stuff, what non-writers call ‘real life’. It’s not so bad. Really.

And then one day, it goes quiet in my mind. The calm before the storm. Then the rumbling. The molecules get off their asses, the neurons re-align, and a shaft of light, maybe just a glimmer, breaks through. It’s enough. I grab my laptop. I can’t type fast enough. Anyone that tries to bother me will wish they hadn’t. The internet stays off. Phones go unanswered. I write. The story pours through my fingertips.

Usually after several hours, the chapter is done. It’s rough, it will need a lot of editing, but I’m happy with it. I go make a cup of tea. And while the kettle is boiling, I think about the next chapter, and the one after, already unfolding in my mind. I know in a few weeks, or a few months, that writer’s block will be back to haunt me. Am I afraid? Nope. It’s a natural part of the writing process. It makes our writing better.

Okay. The kettle has boiled. Tea time. Chapter eleven, here we come!

J.F. Kirwan's novel 66 Metres is now available from Amazon here. 

Lost in wrecks - hardcore wreck-diving

One of the motivations for writing 66 Metres was wreck diving. I've dived wrecks in many different parts of the world, and I am always fascinated by seeing these graveyard ships, imagining how they were before, and witnessing how nature colonizes them, turning even warships into havens for fish and coral.

But they are often spooky, approaching out of the gloom. And there is always an amount of added danger, from becoming lost or getting trapped inside one, to catching a limb on a jagged edge and cutting yourself (never a good idea in shark-infested tropical seas), to finding poisonous fish (e.g. stonefish or scorpionfish) lurking just where you may need to put your hand...

Often the visibility is actually better inside a wreck than outside it - that is until someone kicks up the thick layer of silt carpeting most wrecks. Within seconds almost perfect visibility can drop so you can barely see your outstretched arm.

Much of the diving in 66 Metres takes place in the Isles of Scilly, which has a huge number of wrecks. I dived there many years ago, and it wasn't without incident. On one dive, my buddy and I were inside a wreck at around 40 metres, and had attached a line to the external part of a wreck. On the return from the bowels of the ship (aka the engine room), I reeled the line back in only to find that somebody (we never found out who) had untied it, potentially stranding us inside. On another dive, one much like the Tsuba described in the book, we got separated, and there was much frantic searching at a depth of nearly fifty metres before we found each other again. Not much reserve air left on that dive!

On a third dive there, my buddy and I found a small hatch to a separate chamber deep inside a wreck. I wanted to see what was in there. But the only way I could do it was to take off my stab (buoyancy) jacket and air tank, go through the hatch, and put it back on as soon as I was on the other side. My buddy could read my mind apparently, because she just looked me in the eye and shook her head slowly. So, I didn't do it. But I always wondered what was in there... And in the book one of the two protagonists, Jake, has to do exactly this maneuver. It doesn't go well...

When wreck-diving, it's important to touch as little of the wreck as possible. One of the worst things you can do is to pull yourself along, using the ship's metal as handholds, because if the wreck is rusted away, it may need only one small tug to bring the ceiling crashing down on you. Again, this happens in the book to two inexperienced divers, and the book's heroes have to try and figure out a way to rescue them before their air runs out.

I've also had a lot of fun on wrecks, for example watching three barracuda hunt inside the SS Yongala near Townsville in Australia, and just having fun diving some of my favourite wrecks on the west coast of Mauritius or in Scotland (the Hispania is one of my favorites), and of course the Thistlegorm in the Red Sea, where I always manage to sit on one of the motorbikes in its hold. You never know what you will see on a wreck. On my very last dive in Hawaii, a stone's throw from the buzz of Honolulu, I descended down a line to a pristine wreck at thirty metres, and there on the foredeck were four large turtles just sitting there, like they were playing cards. They looked up at me slowly as I descended. I just started laughing, and then nearly cried as I realized the battery had died in my underwater camera. Who was going to believe me?

66 Metres is available from Amazon and also currently from Sainsbury's for a limited period.