This week (well, last week) I tried to do the first 'serious' writing I've done in many months. Might even be over a year, I'm not sure of that - life very much got in the way last year with some huge events and changes. I've written short stories to hand to my writing groups for critique, but all other work has been planning and editing and plotting and scening; it feels like I haven't actually written in a long time.

And I'm quite rusty. Not in the "everything that I type is complete rubbish" way. I'm not feeling anything particular about the words on the screen (perhaps my brain has accepted that they'll probably change and they don't need to be perfect right now. Or perhaps it'll just start later down the track.) Just in getting myself to actually sit in the chair and type - and not sit in the chair and daydream, sit in the chair and browse the internet, sit in the chair and do something else - is a challenge. Most of the days when I was supposed to write, I didn't. And I wasn't even working on other projects, I was just moodling around. I didn't feel like doing it or any other project.

Creativity has natural cycles - highs when you're inspired by the idea and can't wait to create it, and lows when nothing particularly interests you, and you'd rather flop on the couch with a book or a movie, or navel-gaze out the window. If you can learn what triggers them, so much the better, but they're not always predictable or controllable. Sometimes you just have to go through them, and trust that your energy and inspiration will return.

 When I read Atchity's A Writer's Time, years ago, something stuck securely with me - starting things is always the hardest moment and takes much longer proportionally than the rest of the work. You need to build the momentum in the project that'll keep you going through the low areas that come with the creative process. And if you try to start something during a low time, which I seem to have done, it's all the more difficult to build that.

I don't think there's a magic secret here. If you know how to inspire your own creativity, you can possibly trick your brain out of it, but a lot of the time when we're in a low, we don't necessarily want to do that: creative highs take a lot of energy, and the low periods might well be required recovery time. But that doesn't mean you can't build momentum - you just have to accept that it's going to be slower, and accept what results you can achieve. Nibble away at your work and rewards yourself for small achievements. That's my plan, anyway.

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