Writing as a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut

There are weeks when my writing process feels like a great and terrible steampunk juggernaut, powered by a creaky engine and beholden to its own momentum. When everything is running correctly, I get an extraordinary amount of work done and quickly stack up pages.

When things go wrong, momentum will carry me for a while even though the engine is blowing pistons and and leaking fluids. Then the momentum will falter and the fires of the engine will go dark, and the act of getting the whole thing moving once more feels impossible.

Sometimes, the thing that goes wrong is needing to turn and head in a new direction. Or stop for a while, to focus on something else, then restart after a short break. Sometimes the thing that goes wrong is a problem in the engine itself–a loose screw nobody noticed that gradually rattles free.

Either way, once the momentum is gone, it feels like getting the engine started again is a near-impossible task.

It’s not. What I need to do to get started again is generate words: one word, then the next. Easiest thing in the world to do. They don’t even have to be good words, just words that exist. Even a handful will do it.

The engine feeds on words. Everything after that is navigation, and you do that once the whole machine is up and running again.