When the words just won't come, by Annmarie Miles

March is a difficult month for me. Both my parents' anniversaries are in March, the daffodils are blooming, my mother's favourite flower. There's Mother's Day, and St Patrick's Day - two events I don't really get to celebrate far from home, with no children. It's also a month I find writing very difficult. Because I'm sad. All the sadder this year because I have never been parted from my beloved Ireland for this long before. 

Lately when I have put pen to paper the stories have been melancholy. Even the prompt for my writing group this week, which I usually use for a funny anecdote, ended up being being a morose story. I used to push back against it. I would just stop writing. In fact I was looking at my post this blog from March 2020 and I was in a similar doldrum. This time last year I wasn't writing at all. Now I am. It's dull, but it's written. I will always find March hard. Depression is something I am learning to live with. I am slowly learning to write through it, rather than letting it silence me. 

I was blessed by Claire Musters post on Wednesday, entitled 'Go easy on yourself.' Her closing encouragement was a balm to me. "So, wherever you are at with your writing – whether totally engrossed and prolifically turning out a masterpiece, agonising over producing a single sentence, or somewhere in between – please go easy on yourself. And remember – self-compassion as a writer truly is a thing – and an important one at that."  I loved that. I think it is vital to give ourselves permission to go at the pace that blesses us, and not the pace that burdens us. Particularly in this season; but it's always something to take into consideration. I've also been blessed by James Prescott's article in the latest edition of Christian Writer magazine, entitled, 'Why it's OK when you're not productive.' In it he said, "It’s easy to feel shame about not being productive. We live in a world which sets our value by what we produce, how much we make... But the reality is, in God’s economy, this simply isn’t the case." Hands up, who already knew that. Hands up, who needed to hear it again anyway.

Can you see the pattern? You're not alone if you're struggling. I'm not alone in my struggling. 

Word by word, sentence by sentence, our writing will happen and then one day it will start flowing again. If it's already flowing for you, then praise God, and uphold the arms of your weary brothers and sisters, with prayer and encouragement. If not, then here's your sister :) 

Diary Stock photos by Vecteezy

Annmarie Miles is from Dublin, Ireland.
She lives with her husband Richard who is a pastor in the Eastern Valley of Gwent, in South Wales. She writes short stories, magazine articles, devotional pieces for Christian radio, and blogs about her faith at www.auntyamo.com Her first collection of short stories published in 2013, is called 'The Long & The Short of it'. Her second collection, 'A Sense of the Sea and other stories,' was published in 2018 and in December 2019 she published her first novel, Gorse Lodge. She is currently editing a non-fiction book about being an overweight Christian called, 'Have mercy on me O Lord, a slimmer.'