Inspiration Stagnation

Asking for a Friend: What Do You Do When Your Sea of Ideas Dries Up? 🏜️ (It's Me. That Friend is Me)

Ahoy from the sunny waters aboard the Ventorship! Once again we’ve gone almost a whole month without any vents, and I’m pleased as punch (the Mai Tai-kind that we happen to be having a two-for-one special on at the Pool Bar right this very minute…yes, they’re always free anyway, but a deal’s a deal!) that we’re all feeling assured enough in our writer journeys or with our homegrown writer support that it’s full steam ahead!

Which gives me the opportunity to take my hands off the wheel of this ship (don’t worry, there’s a co-captain around here somewhere) and raise a hesitant hand in the air to say, “I, um. I think I have something to vent?” So, without further ado, here we go:

I’m a very Virgo Virgo, and outline the hell out of my manuscripts before I dive in, and because of that, I never really experience Writer’s Block. That’s not to say I might not reach stumbling points in the outlining process and need to mull over what comes next, but my mind in those moments is in such a state of play and brainstorming that it never feels like a block. It’s more of a puzzle that I’m having fun putting together, and for the past few years, my mind has been ready to rock with new ideas to explore about love, lust, gay shenanigans, and humanity. But for the first time ever, I’m experiencing inspiration block. I just have pass pages left on my Christmas rom-com publishing this November, and then that’s it. There’s nothing else under contract I need to work on, so I’m in this gloriously free place to find out what to write next, but I’m just…blank. Help me, Ventorship passengers. How do I land on my next book idea?

This isn’t to say I don’t have any ideas at all. I have ideas but I’m just a little “Meh” about them. In the past, I’ve clearly had something that I wanted to write about, an emotional seed to the story that grew into a whole novel. In JAY’S GAY AGENDA, it was exploring what it means to be the only out queer person in your community and how your life changes when you’re finally around other queer people. In OUT OF THE BLUE, I’m exploring love for a physical space and how that interacts with—and at times supersedes—our love for a person. RILEY is all about how subjective attraction is and what it’s like to be femme in a community and world that consciously and unconsciously boxes all male bodies into the masculine. My upcoming Christmas novel, FLOPPING IN A WINTER WONDERLAND, explores the unique bonds of siblings and niblings and what constitutes parenthood, as well as highlights how tradition shouldn’t necessarily be the end-goal of a holiday. Rather, the spirit and energy of the holiday is what’s most important, regardless of how that’s achieved. I could go on and on about the themes in my books, but I could not do that for any of my ideas. Right now they’re just, “Gay #1 is plopped into such-and-such scenario in this maybe-interesting setting where they meet Gay #2 and yeah, they fall in love, why not?” There’s no core, no emotion, no light.

I’m a fan of the typical advice of living life, having hobbies outside of writing, actually partaking in adventures and experiences that can be the inspiration for books to come. I’m doing all that. I’m living life. In fact, I’m going through one of the weirdest times of personal change that’s certainly enough to inspire some kind of narrative, but like, nothing’s coming.

Maybe part of the reason is I feel like I’ve said all that my heart needs to say to teen audiences at this point in time. That’s not to say I don’t love YA and its readers. I love them all so much, but I don’t want to be that obnoxious aunt who waxes on and on when she’s already made her point and now is just being self-indulgent while you’re keeping one eye on TikTok. So for now, I feel like I’m going to explore what an adult JJ book looks like. But that’s the problem. I don’t know the answer to that question. What does an adult JJ book look like?

Is it spicy (I hope so)? Is it literary (probably most definitely not because my “literary prose” reads like a caricature of what it means to be literary that will both offend actual literary writers and make my tried and true readers coming for camp rightfully say Uhhhh, WTF?)? Are there adults that want camp and flamboyance and larger-than-life plot points that would never, ever happen except what if they did and wait maybe they could (please be out there)? What would I be trying to say in this mystery (not the genre) adult JJ book? What would this book even be about? Not the logline, but in its heart, what is it about?

I don’t know.

Like, I don’t know.

In real life, I just shrug it off with a smile, not trying to seem too worried to the world-at-large, but internally I’m like, “What if this isn’t just a slump but a long-term slooooooog?”

So…what do y’all do when you reach this point? Feel free to write any suggestions in the comments here, or if you’d like to stay anonymous, email me at heyjasonjune@gmail.com. Give me any and all tips and tricks to get me out of this inspiration stagnation.

Please.

-JJ

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If you’d like to vent about anything author/writing related, write to me at heyjasonjune@gmail.com with the subject: VENTORSHIP. I’ll give you my take in a post, and we’ll crowdsource author opinions in the comments. You’ll remain anonymous, and any haters will be thrown overboard. Ultimately, I think you’re going to be buoyed up by author love and support as we realize we really are all in the same boat 🛳️