Creative Avoidance is Not Your Fault

Why Creative Avoidance Is Not Your Fault

I want to talk about the moment when you finally have time to write—and somehow decide that now is the perfect time to clean out a drawer. You have been thinking about your story all week. You want to work on it. But when you sit down, everything else feels more urgent. Then comes the guilt. You had time. You wasted it. You start wondering whether you actually want this badly enough. Before you turn another unfinished writing session into evidence against yourself, I want you to pause.

You can love writing and still have a hard time getting to the page. 

Writing asks a lot of us. We have to make choices without knowing whether they will work. We have to tolerate the awkward distance between the beautiful thing we imagined and the messy thing we can make today. Sometimes we are putting something deeply personal into words, even when we give it to a fictional character. That can feel vulnerable. Especially when we are also carrying the pressure to make something good, finish something, sell something, or prove that our time spent creating has been worthwhile.

Avoidance is a common human response to something that feels difficult, uncertain, or uncomfortable. Creating something can feel especially difficult because the outcome is unclear. You know what will happen if you send an email or do the dishes. It's a task you can finish, and that feels good! With writing, we don't know what will happen. Will my story be terrible? Will it make me look stupid? Exposed? Will everyone know I'm not a real writer? Will I solve the structure? What is structure anyway? I'll never figure it out.

Our imaginations are good at inventing possibilities. Sometimes we get caught inventing the worst ones. When a task brings up uncomfortable feelings, avoiding it can give us immediate relief. So when you find yourself checking your phone instead of writing, try getting curious about the moment just before you reached for it. Maybe you were tired. Maybe you didn't know what happened next. Maybe you wrote a sentence and immediately decided it was terrible. Each of those gives you something specific to respond to. You can rest, try a different scene, or give that sentence a chance to exist before you judge it.

What would make your writing fun?

Please do take that question seriously. What makes you really light up with joy? And how can you find that feeling in your own writing? Think about how quickly an idea can disappear when you criticize it halfway through arriving. You haven't even found out where it goes yet. Give it a few minutes. Let the character say the strange thing. Follow the image that makes you curious. Write the conversation you have been looking forward to, even if it belongs fifty pages later.

And let yourself play. When I talk about getting back to your inner child, I mean giving yourself permission to approach the page with curiosity and make-believe. Remember the possibilities of a cardboard box, a made-up game, or a stuffed animal with an unnecessarily complicated life. A rabbit could be a detective. The detective could own a bakery. The bakery could be haunted. You keep going because you want to find out what happens. We can bring some of that freedom to play and have fun into our writing now.

Draw your character's bedroom. Give your villain a terrible first date. Write a scene in which two people desperately want the same last piece of cake. Put on music and imagine what your character would do if nobody were watching. You might find a detail you love. You might discover a voice, a conflict, or a scene you would never have reached by staring at the document and demanding a good idea. Follow the strange image in your head, even if you judge it as “bad” before it’s gotten a chance to come to life. 

Having fun helps stories get on the page because it gives us a way to begin.

Try it today. Spend two minutes drawing a place you would like to explore: a treehouse hotel, a haunted grocery store, an apartment with a secret door. Use stick figures. Add whatever interests you. (If drawing isn't your thing, you can describe your ideas as a list or in story form.) Then put someone there and give them a small problem. They have lost something. They are hiding something. Someone has arrived whom they were hoping never to see again.

Write for ten minutes. Leave the sentences alone while you find out what happens. Afterward, circle one moment you want to keep. That is something you can build on. And you got there by giving your imagination something to do.

At Typewriter Party, I want there to be room for you: Experiment! Laugh! Make a mess! Find your way into a story through something that interests you. Remember that writing is storytelling. We get so caught up in the “right” way to write. Take all the rules away and tell a story! You deserve a relationship with your creativity that includes pleasure. Get comfortable in a chair where you can sit crisscross applesauce, put on fuzzy slippers just for writing, or eat chocolates when you sit down (that's what I do). Give yourself treats before and after you write. You may feel exposed, vulnerable, scared, or just plain exhausted with possibility. Give yourself permission to begin with a few minutes of play. Making writing feel more welcoming can take practice. For today, remember that you're allowed to just mess around on the page. What you make does not have to be finished or perfect.

Remember it’s totally normal to avoid writing. Our mind wants us to take the path of least resistance, because life is hard enough. Your brain is trying to protect you from difficulty. It’s our job as writers to recognize that we’re safe when we sit down to write. Creating art forces our brain to create new neural pathways, and that’s so good for our brains and our storytelling! Today, start with a scene you look forward to. Imagine one small, satisfying outcome: a conversation you enjoy writing, a strange image you want to follow, or a moment that surprises you. Put your character in trouble. Let yourself laugh. Write down what happens.

And if you’d like support as you put words on the page, join Back to The Page. You can come and go each month as needed. Typewriter Party is a very small community of beautiful writers getting together to make great things and have fun doing it. https://www.typewriterparty.com/backtothepage

Elements of a Spooky Story (Before You Add the Fog)

Every spooky story needs fog. 

This is not true. But it feels true, which is why fog keeps doing heroic work every October. If you haven’t watched Widow’s Bay, do it now! I love fog. I love flickering lights. I love a creepy doll sitting somewhere no one remembers putting it. I’ve already been to Spirit Halloween three times this year. Keep your spider babies! But decorations aren’t what makes your story great.

So before you release the crows, here’s what your spooky story actually needs.

Someone Who Wants Something

A scary thing is not a story. A scary thing interrupting someone who desperately wants something is. In Widow’s Bay, Tom wants to make his island the new Martha’s Vineyard, but the fog rolls in. Maybe your character wants to keep her child safe. Maybe he wants to make it through his first night alone. Maybe she needs to prove she can handle this job without calling her mother. The want can be enormous or completely ordinary. It just needs to matter to the person living through it.

We don’t even have to like your main character. We do have to understand what they’re fighting for. Otherwise the ghost can drag the entire dining-room table across the ceiling, and we’ll think, “Huh. That seems expensive,” instead of feeling afraid.

One Specific Fear at the Center

Tom’s afraid the legend is real, because that means his son Evan will die if he leaves the island. This is the part writers often skip. They decide what is chasing the character before they decide what the character is really afraid of. The creature, curse, or haunted house is often just the physical shape of that deeper fear. Once you know what nerve your story is pressing, your choices become sharper. Every scare can circle the same emotional wound. 

Name the deeper fear. Is it being watched? Losing control? Not being believed? Becoming your mother? Making one wrong choice and hurting someone you love? A haunted mirror is creepy. A haunted mirror that shows you becoming your mother is a story. Now your monster has a job. It isn’t just there to leap out of the closet. It can press directly on your character’s fear. That is much more interesting than simply giving the monster longer teeth.

A Normal World with One Thing Wrong

Spooky stories work best when the strange thing invades a world that feels real. No need to make everything creepy. Widow’s Bay has Parks and Rec vibes, but with a deadly fog rolling in. If the wallpaper is writhing, the clocks are bleeding, and the narrator has no eyes on page one, there’s nowhere left to go. Start with a world we recognize. Let the refrigerator hum. Let the toast burn. Let the neighbor’s dog bark at the same time it barks every night.

Then change one thing. The dog refuses to enter the hallway. Every family photograph has been turned face down. The baby monitor picks up someone singing, but the baby is asleep beside you. Atmosphere is not about piling on gloomy adjectives. One precise, unsettling detail can do more than three paragraphs of mist. Let the reader recognize the world, then tilt it two degrees sideways. One impossible detail inside an otherwise ordinary world will get me every time.

Rules—even if you never explain them

I will defend this forever: rules make horror scarier, not less mysterious. If the ghost can do absolutely anything at absolutely any time, the reader can’t anticipate it. And if we can’t anticipate it, we can’t dread it. In Widow’s Bay, every toll of the church bell means one soul owed. And until that debt is paid, the terror deepens. What wakes the thing up? Who can see it? What makes it stronger? What does your character think will stop it?

The audience doesn’t need the complete supernatural employee handbook. But give us enough of a pattern that we start watching for it. If the creature appears whenever the baby cries, every tiny whimper becomes terrifying before the creature even arrives.

You can break a rule. You probably should, at least once. But breaking a rule can reveal that the character misunderstood the danger, and so the horror has a chance to evolve. The Sea Hag in Widow’s Bay comes with her own set of rules: once she scratches Tom, she can follow him home.

Escalation

Three knocks followed by five knocks is not escalation. It is more knocking. Every new scare should change the situation. The threat gets closer. An explanation stops making sense. An escape route disappears. Someone else finally sees it. The character tries to fix the problem and makes it much, much worse. We should understand the decision even while we’re screaming, “DO NOT OPEN THAT.”

In Widow’s Bay, we understand Tom’s choice to keep his secret because, even though deep down he knows the truth, he doesn’t want to admit it, even to himself, and so the danger increases. 

A Point of No Return

Eventually, your character must do something that makes it impossible to return to normal. They open the locked room. Tell the lie. Read the forbidden book. Invite the stranger inside. Decide not to call the police. Destroy the one object that might have protected them. The strongest points of no return come from character. A fiercely independent person refuses help. A grieving person follows a familiar voice. A desperate parent trusts the wrong stranger. The choice makes emotional sense—even when the audience is silently screaming, DO NOT GO IN THERE.

In Widow’s Bay, Tom’s encounter with the Sea Hag destroys his ability to dismiss the curse and sends him into the real journey. Much later, he crosses a moral point of no return when he poisons Ruth’s tea, choosing, however briefly, to sacrifice an innocent person to save the island. That decision is often the moment a spooky situation becomes a real story.

A Price Paid, and One Last Shiver 

The ending has to cost something. I don’t necessarily mean a body count. But the character should not walk out untouched. Maybe they survive but lose what they were trying to save. Maybe they defeat the monster and carry part of it home. Maybe everyone is safe, but no one believes what happened. Maybe life looks normal again except for one small, awful detail.

The best final image connects back to the story’s central fear. It does not simply shout, “Surprise! Another ghost!” It leaves the reader with an emotional aftertaste. The last image doesn’t have to be loud. It just has to follow us home.

At the end of Widow’s Bay, Tom doesn’t lose his son. He loses the possibility of saving everyone. To free the island, he may have to sacrifice Evan; to protect Evan, he must allow the island to keep taking sacrifices. Tom and his son Evan ride home together, safe, after Tom throws away the proof that Evan is related to the curse. And then the island bell tolls eight times, showing him the cost of his choice. We’ve already seen the dungeon waiting beneath the town—and we know exactly where those eight people may end up next season.

Now You Can Add the Fog

And the dolls. And the crows. And the cursed Victorian child named Eustace, god love him. But underneath all of that, give us a person with something to lose. Find the fear they can’t escape. Keep tightening the trap until they’re forced to make a choice.

Then make them open the door.

Writing prompt: Your character wakes at 3:13 a.m. to a sound coming from a room that does not exist. They try to ignore it until someone on the other side calls their name in a voice they trust.

For more, come to Saturday’s Free Typewriter Party where we’ll write spooky stories together. Register here: www.typewriterparty.com/free

Thank you so much for reading Typewriter Party’s first blog post! Did you know that BLOG is my least favorite word, but BOG is my absolute favorite??? Make it make sense. The horror!