Writing and the Female Cycle.

Every woman in the world knows how we’re related to the ocean.  Just like the masses of water reach for the moon in a repeated futile act, washing the shores with high tides, low tides, spring tides, so our bodies have an ebb and flow which influences mood, weight, sometimes also productivity.

Writers are like women.  In many cases, of course, they are women, but females of the species Homo Sapiens Authorium Dementius are doubly blessed.  Not only to we get to contend with PMS, we also have to deal with a creative ‘cycle’ that can be as fickle, almost as difficult as a woman’s emotional ups and downs.

There are those times when you’re more energised than the Duracell bunny and words pour forth in an unstoppable stream, and others when no amount of staring at the blank screen or hovering fingers over the keyboard can force a coherent sentence from the grey matter between your ears.  This wheel of fortune up and down has in my life taken on a definite pattern.  It plays out over months, a flurry of productivity seeing me writing obsessively every moment of the day I’m not engaged in other irritating neccessities such as eating.  When I’m in this up phase, I can write the first draft of a fifty-thousand word novel in under twenty days.  The story ideas pile up in my head, all waiting to be written.

This phase is followed by a period of time where I can either write nothing or I write very little, at an agonisingly slow pace.

The first year this happened I panicked.  I tried to force out a story lodged in my head, but it was no use.  Nothing would work.  Nothing would ‘come together’.  The drought was eventually broken.  When next I entered the down phase, I’d been there and done that, but I wasn’t happy about it.  Eventually I made my way out the other side and started writing again.

Now I’m used to the cycle, and I’ve learned to just go with it.  Instead of getting down when the roaring flood of words slowed to a trickle, I simply enjoyed the time off.

There are stirrings in my head that make me think the recharge is almost complete, that the next creative time is near.  It doesn’t matter.  I’ve learned to enjoy this weird aspect of my life.