How to Get Your Mojo Back: Mojo Writers Guides, #3

By Andi Winter

Search and Rescue for Your Creativity

Does this sound like you?

You were writing with joy and ease, delighting in the words appearing on the page, and then you hit the wall. Smack dab, with the brick imprints on your forehead to prove it. And no matter how hard you try to write, or how much you want to write, that wall just gets higher and harder.

More than anything, you want to get back to living a creative life with the fun and joy you used to feel.

This book will give you the tools you need to get your writing mojo back. You will learn how to get yourself into a place where you can't help but create. You'll also develop a practice that will keep you writing even when life throws you curves.

Learn how to recover your creativity with this compact guide and get writing again!

Andi Winter lost her mojo after writing fifty-seven stories (including nine novellas, and most of a novel) over a year and a half during a worldwide pandemic. In her quest to recover her mojo, she researched and developed the techniques in this book, and continues to use them to keep her writing (and life) mojo in a happy place. She is the author of How to Write a Short Story and How to Write a Novel in 30 Days.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andi Winter
• Release date: Sep 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215745359

Book preview

How to Get Your Mojo Back

How to Get Your Mojo Back

A Mojo Writers Guide

Andi Winter

Rainy Mountain Publishing

How to Get Your Mojo Back

Copyright © 2022 by Andi Winter

All rights reserved.

Cover art copyright © slothastronaut / 123RF

ISBN-13: 9798352805558 (print edition)

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For fellow writers looking for a way back to creativity.

I hope this road map points you in the right direction.

My get up and go has got up and went

---

—D.E. Shiveley

Contents

Introduction

Eye of the Tiger

1. The Hierarchy of Needs

2. Let’s Get Physical

3. The Safety Dance

4. We Belong Together

Getting Mental

5. Free Your Mind

6. New Attitude

Creativity Rules of the Road

7. The Laws of the Land

8. The Eight Rules of Creativity

9. ICYMI: Easy ≠ Lazy

In It for the Long Haul

10. Systems, not Goals

11. Systems & Practice

12. But Practice Isn’t Sexy

Developing a Practice

13. Basics of Practice

14. What a Writing Practice Might Actually Look Like

15. A Writing Practice Isn’t Just About Writing

Conclusion

Resources

Mojo Checklist

Creativity Laws and Rules

A Writing Practice

Some Thoughts About Writer’s Block

Sneak Peek of Spring Comes Twice

Other Titles by Andi Winter

About the Author

Introduction

In March 2020, I was on top of the world. I had finished writing a trilogy of novels that I was excited to share with my readers. And then a pandemic hit and overnight my life (well, everybody’s life) was upended. Suddenly everything was chaos and all my energy got sucked out dealing with rapidly changing work and life situations. A constant rolling with the punches. Any energy I had went to purely survival needs: food, sleep, and writing.

However, with my writing, I had an escape where I could forget about the world around me, and that worked for about eighteen months, around the point when my life returned to a vague resemblance to a pre-pandemic normal.

Which was when my mojo said, I’m outta here and I hit the Creativity Wall.

I felt miserable because I was beyond stuck—I was trapped in quicksand with no way out. No escape. No hope. I was frustrated, angry, depressed. The whole Fun House of Negative Emotions without any of the fun. Even more troubling was that I really shouldn’t have felt that way. Life was improving, so if anything, I should have been happy, excited, and bursting with ideas and energy.

But no.

While self-doubt has always plagued me (what artist isn’t plagued by self-doubt?), it had never stopped me in my tracks and got me to the point of seriously considering quitting writing for good.

Of seriously ending my identity as a writer.

But throughout it all, a tiny flicker of a creative flame kept hanging in there inside my soul. A tiny flicker that refused to give in, that warned that if I quit, if I gave up, then I really would lose part of my soul. Even thinking about quitting writing chipped off parts of my soul, damaged it, which only made me feel worse.

And yet, that tiny flame continued to flicker.

There are a lot of books out there about getting past writer’s block, about increasing your creativity, about sparking your imagination. I devoured those books hoping to find the answer, the Just do this! that would solve my problem. Some recommendations helped, but the majority of them fell into one of two camps:

1) Pretty self-help words

2) Cranky drill sergeant

And I will freely admit, those are definitely two sides of my own personality. Even so, neither truly helped me.

The Pretty Self-Help words felt too patronizing and pathetic. The Cranky Drill Sergeant only made me feel worse (and combined with my inherent distaste for arbitrary rules and authority figures, made me even more conflicted with myself).

At some point I realized that if there wasn’t some guide out there that would fix me, then I would have to make it myself.

(I use the term fix ironically here because we don’t need fixing; what we need is some perspective.)

So in the vein of chefs and mad scientists and scrapbookers, I brought together a mishmash of ingredients from assorted books, websites, podcasts, and personal experiences, threw in some actual psychological research (aka science), and tried to organize it in some aesthetically appealing (and coherent) fashion, et voila! I put myself into the role of test subject, and gave the draft guide a try. Could I find a way to recover my writing mojo, in a healthy and sustainable way, a way that I could rely on when everything around me fell apart?

The answer is this book you hold in your hands.

(That’s a Yes! by the way.)

What you read here is what I used to recover my creativity, to get my writing mojo back. We are going to look at how to get ourselves into a physical, emotional, and mental state where we can’t help but create. Then we will consider ways of approaching