when a giant ant drops down your shirt 🐜
(This is one of my many jungle adventures. It was taken with a camera in the Digital Dark Ages pre iPhones. I had to take a picture with my iPhone to digitalize it. That’s me on the left.)
What did I do when I found out I was four foreign language credits shy from university graduation?
Plan A: Sign up for an accelerated summer course with a ghastly five days a week four hours a day schedule.
First day of class sitting inside staring out the window at a beautiful sunshine Seattle day?
I knew I’d never make it.
Plan B: Call my big brother.
“Hey, can your admin buddy in the study abroad program get me on an exchange to a Spanish speaking country?”
And that’s how I found myself two weeks later living with a family in Costa Rica and having adventures.
One adventure involved hiking to the top of a jungle-covered mountain.
And a giant ant the size of my thumb the guide called a “bullet ant.”
No one got to see it immediately, because it had dropped out of the trees down the shirt and into the cleavage of Angie, another woman on the tour.
It BIT HER between the breasts.
I had never heard a real-life horror movie scream like that before.
Writing a novel can be a long journey up a mountain through a jungle infested with bullet ants.
How do you keep generating the energy you need to keep going and finish your novel?
In my experience, the capacity for motivation and the ability to keep going depends a lot on the writer and where they are in the jungle.
But here are three of the biggies I regularly encounter with my clients:
#1 You’re worn out.
You’re been slogging along pushing yourself to the max of your energy (maybe even a few critters have bit you along the way) and now you’re exhausted.
The first thing you do is TAKE A BREAK. This isn’t a race.
Writing a novel isn’t only about sitting at your desk till your butt is numb, banging away on your keyboard, putting words on the page till you can’t see straight.
When you expend all that creative energy, you need to recharge your batteries.
Go for a walk. Read a book. Watch a movie. Stare at a wall.
Give yourself the space to think about those words and dream the worlds you’ve created.
#2 Something’s not working with your story, and you know it.
You don’t know what it is. You don’t know how to fix it.
This sucks, because how can you fix what’s broken if you don’t know what it is?
Pushing yourself to keep writing “no matter what” isn’t a great answer for this.
When something’s broken, and you keep pushing, you’re liable to perpetuate and exacerbate whatever’s wrong.
The first easy solution is to go through the section (chapter, page) you’re working on and make a simple outline – a bullet list of what’s happening.
Who’s in the scene?
What’s happening?
What’s the conflict?
What happens next?
The key here is to keep it simple. At this level, you’re looking for the obvious breaks.
#3 Your WHY isn’t doing it for you.
We write because something is compelling us to put stories on the page and share them with the world.
What’s your reason?
Think of your WHY as your writing battery pack.
I’ll be honest, some WHYs come with a lot more energy behind them than others.
Do you like stories and think it would be fun to put some out in the world to see what happens? It either works or it doesn’t? And if you’re not making six figures in six months that’s okay, you’ve got other things to do?
That’s not a very big battery.
I have a client who is compelled to write because she has a job that is damaging to her body. Without retirement, she’s going to have to work till she drops dead. She’s terrified she’ll end up with a broken-down body and unemployable before she’s 60. She wants to start self publishing books so in the next 5-10 years she can quit her job.
She could be the Energizer Bunny with that WHY.
And with that said, if you don’t want to write, DON’T.
Don’t force yourself to write if you hate every second of it and would rather be bitten by a bullet ant.
If you need permission to stop writing, this is me giving it to you.
The Story Mafia isn’t going to show up at your doorstep wanting to know where your finished novel is.
The beautiful thing about writing is that there are always stories out there to be written and pages to write them on.
They’re waiting for you.
What happened to Angie after she was bit by the bullet ant?
Between gritted teeth, she told us, “I came all this way for this hike. I’m not quitting because of an ant.”
Despite the guide’s wide-eyed worry, Angie finished the hike to the top of the mountain and deserved every shot of celebratory tequila we bought her that night back at the lodge.
Keep going.
Hello!
My name is Jocelyn.
Story warrior, book lover, day dreamer, gardener, and creative. I help serious writers roll up their sleeves, get their novel ready for publishing, and reach readers. When I’m not elbow-deep in the story trenches, I’m outside world-building in my garden and battling weeds with my three criminal mastermind cats.
GET IT NOW
Don’t write another chapter until you grab the 10 Step Chapter Checklist.
Transform your chapters from blah to badass.