Use Life’s Challenge as Creative Fuel

Writing through the struggle

Lately, I’m down to writing one blog a week. For someone who started writing on Medium with the goal of posting one article a day, this is a considerable change for me. It’s not permanent, nor did I plan to cut back.

In the last few weeks, I was literally in the middle of a raging fire, and evacuation warnings kept me sleeping lightly or not at all in case I had to grab my animals and laptop and run. For a week straight, I watched the fire move closer, then away, then sneak around our local mountains and try to approach our neighborhood from a different angle. It was definitely intense. I also started a new semester of teaching at my university, and I’m getting ready for a new book release! Added to that are normal author talks and appearances that I do regularly.

But these are the challenges we all face as writers. Maybe not a fire threatening our homes, but other difficulties that keep us from writing as much or as often as we’d like. Part of what makes us productive writers is that in these very moments of chaos, we can produce some of our best writing. Instead of seeing life’s struggles as a barrier to creativity, we have learned to reframe them as a source of inspiration.

And if you haven’t learned that, then this blog is for you.