Years ago, I booked a last-minute holiday to one of the Canary Islands – a volcanic archipelago off the coast of northwestern Africa.
My hotel was a huge white slab that had a limited roster of activities - sunbathing by the beach, sunbathing by the pool, sunbathing by the bar. Not great for a fidgety, pale-skinned redhead.
Instead, I hired a car and decided to explore the island. Miles up the coast road, away from the resort towns, I found a pristine beach bordered by sand dunes that lapped at the edge of the road. The place was deserted. No vehicles, no tourists. I pulled off the road and parked between the low dunes, then lay in the shade of the car, looking out to the ocean. An idyllic hour or two passed.
It was only when I tried to leave, that I realised why no-one had parked there.
The sand was a trap - dry, powdery and deep – and the small hire car couldn’t get any traction. I tried raw power and ground myself deeper. I tried shifting backwards then forwards, but that just made things worse. I stomped around looking for rocks to wedge under the wheels, but volcanic stones are tyre shreddingly jagged.
Eventually, I dug out out two channels in the sand with my hands, then let some air out of the tyres. That worked, but by this point I was sunburnt, grumpy and had a raging thirst.
I thought about this incident recently, after experiencing one of my own periodic writing ruts. For me it starts with my writing has got stale, and that what I’m writing is just a variation on familiar themes.
I get excited by an idea, start writing a draft, and then feel deflated halfway through because there’s no juice or energy, or the delivery and language feels so very predictable. I get bored with my own ideas and then downright annoyed that the creative process I have been relying on no longer seems to work.
Often, like younger me in that sand-bound car, I try to get out of the rut by trying too hard, and end up spinning my wheels. Or I try the route of complete free writing, with no restraints whatsoever. That can work, but it can produce a different kind wheel spinning, because I’m still trying to produce something ‘good’.
So here’s my version of a solution. To stretch the metaphor, it’s about letting some air out of your tyres, making everything a little less pressured and more pliable.
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