What it feels like to be stuck

...and why working harder isn’t always the answer.

Hello writing friends - Chris here again.

As you might know, we’re in the early stages of writing our second book. Well, I say “early”, I first wrote about the central idea behind it in 2016 - back when people still wrote blogs. It’s so embarrassing I’m not even going to share a link to it. I forgot about the idea entirely for years until we started playing around with topics for our first book, Written.

The concept that intrigued me was something researchers call ‘disfluency’. Their studies suggest that, unlike many other tasks in life, creative work is different for two reasons:

1. Creative work proceeds by trial and error, which means we fail as much (if not far more) than we succeed.

2. When we undertake a creative task, we never really know if we’re making progress because the “solution” isn’t clear.

Failing a lot - and never knowing whether you’re close to finishing - creates disfluency: that “what-on-god’s-sweet-earth-am-I-doing-with-my-life?” feeling of struggle and being stuck that you’re probably familiar with. Researchers believe disfluency is why we underestimate our creative potential and abilities. It’s also why we give up.

A breakthrough idea

Discovering this idea was exciting - it explained so much. Bec liked it too, so we popped it into the closing chapter of Written. We felt smug that we’d found this new perspective and neatly teed it up for our next book. All we needed to do was write it - easy, right? That was the plan for 2023: promote our first book and write the next one. Instead, we made zero progress. Despite plenty of conversations - some more argumentative than others - we didn’t write a word.

2024 rolled around and we decided enough was enough - it was time to knuckle down. We had to start making some hard choices. Bec decided to sacrifice writing her novel (something she’d wanted to do for ages and even received funding for). She had a writing group she submitted novel chapters, but instead, she began submitting chapters for the new non fiction book.

She applied all the advice we normally give to other writers. She interviewed people, wrote every day, sent off sample chapters, tested ideas with friends, and set goals. We held weekly and monthly planning meetings. We did everything we were supposed to do. “Write The Next Book” made it onto the office whiteboard as a standing item. So what happened in 2024? Lots of writing - but no actual progress.

Into 2025

I’ll be honest: conversations at the end of last year were getting tetchy. Since we’re married, frustrations about the book started creeping into other areas of life. Why weren’t we moving forward? I felt partly to blame - intimidated by Bec’s action-oriented focus, I felt stuck in limbo, doing nothing except reading research papers in the park, circling ideas and feeling confused. But confused about what? It wasn’t clear.

Being stuck on a creative problem feels different than being stuck on a puzzle. With a puzzle, you have a level of control - you can put in the hours to solve it. With creativity, there’s no clear definition of “solved” and spending too much time on the problem might even make it worse.

It’s easy to think that if you do enough and act fast enough, the book will write itself. But creativity isn’t a straight path from idea to execution. It contains uncertain foggy places where you get lost before you can find your way. While we’re not certain of the destination yet, I’m doing my best to accept this is part of the creative process.

That’s all for now. Keep writing,

Chris