And What Made Me Start Again
I have been writing since I was 10 years old. Then I lost it a few months ago.
Something just kind of unclicked. I couldn’t string out a sentence if you paid me, and I have been paid for it. At work, at cafés, in my own house, in the woods; nothing inspired and nothing delighted. I would spend a whole afternoon on something, just to chuck it into the trash the next day. I would have these huge, sprawling worlds curling out of my pen and then they would die just as quickly.
My own black hole. My own all-consuming nightmare.
Back on my old pen name, I’ve written six books. All novellas and short fiction. All flaming hot erotica. None of it especially good but all of it enough to push legitimacy. I am a Writer and here are my works.
I killed it at my local writing workshop. I’ve been on podcasts. I talked at a convention. Oh, I was such hot shit.
About a year after my latest one, it was getting to be about that time. I needed to write something else. Something newer, hotter, sexier, bolder. I had a whole slew of ideas, a tantalizing cadre of gorgeous potential. All I had to do was take one idea by her soft, ephemeral hand, and just write.
And I couldn’t.
The instant I tried to put anything down, it just would not happen. And I tried everything. I swapped my laptop for my notebook and back again. I dedicated whole days of café camping to it. I made playlists, Pinterest boards, collages, Sims 4 files. I would have called in actors to stage tableaus if only I could have come up with a damned script.
The ringleader of the shit circus was pressure. I felt like I had all these expectations around me. To write something, to make it good, to make it hot, to sell a million. Be authentic, but keep the smiling the whole time. No one wants to read about writer’s block without a way to fix it (and I will get to how I unstuck myself; permit me my wallowing, please.)
Another factor was the community I had gotten involved with. Not my community; I don’t think I ever had ownership of it and I never felt like I was part of it. Hence the frustration, I think. For five years, I tried to play get-along girl. I traded opportunities and sincere congratulations. I wanted them to like me. I wanted to have friends. But all I ever found were people who were too self-absorbed to realize I was there. Not the least of which was from some authors who had been asking for a collaboration. I don’t want to drag their names in, so I won’t name them, but I had collaborated with them before and I didn’t want to collaborate with them again. They wanted me to change parts of my story to better fit the stories they wanted to write. You can call it ego if you want, but I can understand altering an idea or compromising and this wasn’t it. This was crossing boundaries and ganging up. Working with them was my final straw, I think; the moment erotica felt too dirty to do.
I did what no one else would have done: I burned down my old pen name.
Then I waited four months. Four months of frustration before I finally declared a break. Doctor Google had declared it “Creative Burnout” and told me to rest, and I took the news about as well as a runner being told her ACL was torn.
I was desperate to get back into writing, but I was determined to let my mind rest.
That said, I was determined to be the most efficient recovering creative. I took up a different creative hobby. I spent time with friends. I was doing so well.
So well that I decided to look into creative burnout solutions. I sat in a crowded Whole Foods, drinking a prebiotic soda and scrolled. Reddit coughed up a massive thread about a writer who was no longer finding their work fun, and what they should do to fix it. Some of the information was incredibly unhelpful (“Just start enjoying yourself again”) and some of it was prescriptive but vague. And then one person said to watch “Kiki’s Delivery Service.”
The name had me cock my head. I hadn’t thought about that movie in years. It held a special place in my heart, separate from my favorite Miyazaki movie, “Spirited Away.” I hadn’t seen the movie since I was seven-years old and I had only mentioned it to my partner in passing, who had never seen it at all.
I figured it couldn’t hurt. At least Phoenyx would see it.
In the movie, Kiki has the talent she loves— flying on her broomstick— and she uses it to find her place in her chosen community. For a while, that’s enough. But as social pressure mounts and she begins to doubt herself, Kiki begins to lose her powers. She has to take a long break to find it again and is only able to do so when she remembers why she had started in the first place. Miyazaki has said that it’s about independence and reliance. But the whole movie acts as a metaphor for creativity and creative burnout.
So we loaded up the movie and from the moment it started, I couldn’t stop crying.
I’m someone who cries at just about anything. I cry at insurance commercials and music videos. They don’t even have to be sad. I’m just a very sentimental person at heart. The point is that it’s not strange for me to cry at a movie, but through the whole thing? From literally the first minute?
The message was clear. I needed to remember how I started. I had to recall why I liked writing in the first place.
I remembered writing my last novella while my family fell apart because my dad was having his midlife crisis…
I remembered writing in a bakery every morning before I went to work in a two-faced soul-sucking place…
I remembered writing in my cramped college dorm to get away from my passive-aggressive roommate…
I remembered writing when I was getting bullied at high school, middle school, elementary school…
I wrote to show myself that it was possible to be wanted when no one wanted me around.
I wrote to give myself a better world and to share that world with other people.
My new pen name is symbolic. Ruby for the sun that’s setting on my old pen name and my old, cynical way of working. White for the pure vision I hope to bring to my new work.
Let’s enjoy everything together…
Ruby White 
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