There are days when the words refuse to show up.
Not in some tortured, dramatic, tragic-poet sense, but in the quiet, frustrating, teeth-gritting way. The cursor blinks. The notes stare back. The world, which normally speaks to me in fragments and images and things I can mold into story, goes radio silent. I try to summon a line, even just a sentence, and there’s nothing there but static.
That’s when I start organizing.
Not as a last resort. Not as an escape. But as a form of creative triage. Because if I can’t write something today, I can at least care for the space where my stories live.
I’ll clean out my project folders, even if I’ve opened the same set three times this week and haven’t added a word to any of them. I’ll reorganize character notes that haven’t been touched since the last time my brain was firing properly. I’ll rename files, create backups, sort loose ideas into neatly labeled purgatories like “simmering” or “bones only.” I’ll stare down my digital chaos and make it neat—not because I believe it’ll fix me, but because it makes the not-creating feel a little less like failure.
To someone else, it probably looks like avoidance.
But to me, it’s an act of devotion.
It’s a way of saying, “I haven’t left. I’m still here. I still believe the words will come back, even if today they won’t speak to me.”
And that kind of belief matters more than most people think.
Because creating isn’t always about output. Sometimes it’s about proximity. About staying close enough to the work that when the spark finally reappears, you’re already holding the match.
There’s also a strange comfort in the illusion of control. When the story won’t bend to me, I can at least bend the structure that’s supposed to hold it. And I know—I know that’s a coping mechanism. But I also know it works. Because somewhere in the click-drag-drop of reorganizing scenes I haven’t written yet, I remember that I want to tell this story. That the silence is temporary. That the fog will lift.
And if it doesn’t today, that’s fine.
There are other kinds of work.
I’ll update my character database, even if none of them are talking to me.
I’ll outline a project I know damn well I won’t start for six months.
I’ll create templates for a new blog series like I haven’t already abandoned three.
I’ll scroll through old drafts—not to hate them, not to rewrite them—just to be near them.
Because sometimes you don’t write the thing. You just tend the soil.
And that counts.
We don’t talk enough about the middle space between creative flow and full-stop burnout. The place where nothing’s wrong, exactly, but nothing’s moving either. Where the tank isn’t empty, but the gas is sloshing in weird directions and nothing will turn over. That’s where organizing lives.
It’s not about making art. It’s about keeping your hands busy near it. About trusting that even if the ideas are quiet right now, they still live here. Somewhere. Beneath the piles. Behind the noise.
And if I keep the room clean, maybe they’ll come home sooner.
So no—I don’t see organizing as procrastination. I see it as creative scaffolding.
A bridge between silence and inspiration.
A ritual. A prayer. A defiant little whisper:
I still care.
And caring, on the days when everything feels too loud or too hollow or too still, is enough.
