Exchange of Realities

So there you are. Got up absurdly early, got back home later than you’d like, dozed off during your valuable transit time, no ideas worth noting during lunch break, friend taking you home was good for inspiration for other things but didn’t give you anything immediately useful for your current project, and the only idea you have is something that can’t be done justice to in the amount of time you need to put everything together and still get to sleep before you dump yourself into the same mess tomorrow.

What to do?

Last-minute crunch is a universal, spanning the creative media with its ominous shadow. For the blogger, it’s blending your time and your deadlines. For the gamer, it’s realizing that it’s the day before a major event and you still have no idea what your players are planning, let alone what you’re going to do to counter it. For the professional writer, it’s that time when the manuscript hasn’t been going as smoothly as usual and the editor’s getting antsy, or maybe there’s a contest…

Either way, it’s stress. Lots and lots of stress. So how do we cope, when the clock’s rigged the race and the ideas aren’t coming?

Everyone says plan ahead, but while it may help prevent a crunch, it’s not too useful when you’re actually in one. And some people find themselves spending so much time planning they never actually get around to doing what they’re trying to set up. So we’ll leave plans out of the equation for now.

Try not to panic. That’s the hard part, particularly as the deadline draws closer, but really, if most of your thought process is going into figuring out how much trouble you’re in, how are you going to have enough brain left to resolve the block that’s making you freak out?

Increase your idea intake. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean read a book, or go comment-hopping; these can be very good for inspiration, but they’re just as likely to eat your time as to get you your next big post. I’m looking more at simpler things. Pay closer attention to the world around you. Odds are you’ll find something that pushes you in a good direction. If you’re going to do this by reading, I strongly suggest using a newspaper—it’s compartmentalized, so you can keep it from eating too much of your time, and current events can be very good for ideas.

Get something to eat. Blood sugar never hurts, and if you’re like me and forget to eat when stressed, your problem might be just as much a lack of it as anything else.

If you’ve got something that you can use as an inspirational trigger, don’t be afraid to use it. This might be a book of quotes and your writer’s journal, or a bucket of Play-Doh to knead and see what results, or a painting that’s basically a bunch of ink-splatters (good for trying to find images)—you name it.

Ask yourself questions. Even such mundane ones as “Why can’t I figure out what to write?” Sometimes, you’ll have an answer.

And then there’s using the situation as a catalyst. We’re always told to write what we know; if what we’re currently intimately familiar with is the desperation of a rapidly approaching deadline, why not write about the desperation of a rapidly approaching deadline, or find a way to incorporate time crunch into the session? (Yes, I’ll admit it, it’s what I’m doing now. Spending more than twelve hours a day either at work or commuting to/from it is taking some getting used to.)

Of course, there’s no guarantee that any of these is going to work, but throwing enough of them at the problem does usually get some creative juices flowing. Even if all the ideas you get are the wrong ones, it’s thinking, and that helps. It’s like dancing from foot to foot in a game of badminton—you may not know which way to go, but it’s easier to change direction on the fly than to start moving from a standstill.

So what do you do when the pressure sets in?