How to write without writing

I always wanted to be an actress. Growing up, I thrived on theatre games, threadbare green rooms, and the kinetic fever dream of opening night. More than anything, I think I wanted to crawl inside each character, experience their lives—their worlds—from the inside out.

It wasn’t until I moved to Los Angeles that I realized something was missing for me. Don’t get me wrong: I still love dressing up in amazing costumes and immersing myself in the fleeting moments between “Action!” and “Cut!” but I’ve never found myself able to fully experience the stories. Not the way I needed to.

I needed to write.

At the best of times, writing feels like pure creation. The sheer immediacy of experiencing a story as it unfolds for the first time is exhilarating. My fingers fly across the keyboard, racing to keep up with the neurons firing left and right inside my head. It’s C+ writing at best and the typos are plenty, but at the end of the day I feel a heavy satisfaction like I’ve run a a very long way. I go to bed with some newly given name on my lips, sweeter than any honey, whispering it to myself as my mind unspools and, finally, I sleep.

At the worst of times, writing can fuck itself. Creative writing is a constantly moving target—one that simultaneously brags that it can be done on a whim of inspiration and mocks the would-be writer for every moment without said inspiration.

The days without inspiration used to be the days I hated writing. The days I thought I wasn’t cut out to be a writer after all, due to a lack of talent or a lack of determination or even a lack of—yes—inspiration.

For me, overcoming the bad days meant going back to the beginning, the actress craving a deeper understanding, the why of it all. I write because I want to immerse myself, to experience the worlds and characters and stories. To taste, touch, smell, and hear their lives, even as I create them. And when I’m beating my head against the wall, I’m not immersing myself in anything. I’m belittling my imagination, hyper focusing on the writing that only makes up a tiny corner of what should be a larger experience.

These four immersive tricks consistently help me overcome imagination fatigue and live to write another day.

Life imitates art

When I can’t find my story in my head, I seek it in the real, tangible world. The back corner of the pub that looks like a crumbling castle wall. The recessed flower bed, untended so long it could pass for a witch’s garden. The dense hedge, no doubt disguising some celebrity home from prying eyes—at the right angle, it becomes a dark, twisted forest.

I’m sure the real reason this trick works is because it gets me out of the house. My eyes search for hidden portals into another world, my legs settle into a steady rhythm, and the ideas start to flow. The notes app on my phone has become a hoarder’s basement of hastily scribbled thoughts from these neighborhood adventures. I have hundreds of photos of plants that I’d definitely be able to harvest in a video game, along with little made-up field notes that have a way of sneaking into my overall worldbuilding.

Check out the latest specimens from my #alchemyIRL wanders on instagram @icanharvestz.

Get cookin’ good lookin’

When I’m really lost, I need to find equal footing with my characters—and everyone’s gotta eat. So I find something my characters would eat and I make it. Sometimes this involves adapting an old recipe or cobbling together different recipes like world-building puzzle pieces. Sometimes it’s as simple as a loaf of bread or a steaming glass of mulled wine. Rarely do I finish this process without writing something down. And bonus: guaranteed snack at the end!

As if I needed an excuse to go to Target and sniff candles

They say smell is the sense with the strongest tie to memory. This trick applies that principle in reverse, using smell to create the memory itself. I take walks in the pouring rain, drifting up and down a particular street to smell the dripping trees. I make custom blends of essential oils, trying to evoke a particular place or character or scene. I walk from room to room waving incense like a wand and sauté shallots with butter just to infuse the house with the right kind of warm. And sometimes, yeah, I just go to Target and sniff candles. FOR SCIENCE.

Face the music

There’s something really satisfying about zooming out from the words on the page and trying to capture the essence of the story in music. If I’m really feeling ambitious, I’ll even try to follow the emotional flow of the story, structuring a playlist to build and twist and swell in the right places along the way. I recommend Spotify for this, if only because its recommendations have taken me down some weird, wonderful rabbit holes, but I imagine any music subscription service would work.

You can find some of my story flow playlists in the Speculative Playlists sidebar.

An immersive, experience-based approach to writing has helped me breathe new life into my writing, boosting both my productivity and my internal sense of fulfillment. More importantly, it has helped me transform my uninspired days from something to be dreaded into sensory feasts I actually find myself looking forward to.

Original artwork by Emily Jermusyk, @Emilyjsketches.