When Your Writing Gets Stuck, Think Like Sophie the Goat
As a book midwife living off-grid in the Okanogan Highlands, I’ve found that my goats often teach me unexpected lessons about writing. One of our goats, Sophie, recently gave me a new perspective on overcoming writing challenges.
Sophie is our bottle baby. She grew up getting lots of attention from people, which made her a bit different from our other goats. We briefly rehomed her to a large family that planned to train her as a milking goat. Living off-grid, every necessity you can produce at home makes a difference, so it seemed like a good fit.
But Sophie, used to being the center of attention, found an unusual way to get noticed at her new farm. She kept getting her head stuck in the fence, then crying until someone came to free her. This happened multiple times a day. Our attention-loving girl had found a way to get noticed, even if it wasn’t comfortable!
We’ve all been there as writers, haven’t we? Stuck in a metaphorical fence, waiting for inspiration to come to the rescue.
When Sophie came back to us, I taped a stick across her horns so she couldn’t fit her head through the fence. She hated it at first. But then she realized her stick-enhanced horns made her look bigger to her siblings. Suddenly, our tiniest little goat was strutting around with newfound confidence, and her big brothers backed off!
As writers, sometimes the very thing that feels like an obstacle can become our strength. That challenging chapter might be pushing you to dig deeper. The feedback that stings at first could be the key to leveling up your craft.
So often when I talk with aspiring authors, they’re feeling stuck. It’s not that they lack ideas or passion. It’s the sheer enormity of writing a book, fitting all those ideas together, that can be overwhelming.
Just like Sophie needs her stick to navigate her world safely, authors can benefit from a solid plan to guide them through the writing process.
A solid book plan is not as constraining as it might sound. It can be surprisingly freeing, actually. It gives you containers for all those ideas and a map you can lay them out on, connecting them together. It breaks down that mountain of a project into manageable steps.
And just like Sophie found unexpected confidence from her stick, I’ve seen authors discover new strengths once they have a plan for their book. They know who’s going to read their book, what it’s going to do for them, and how it’s going to be published. That’s exciting!
So if you’re feeling stuck with your book project, remember Sophie and her stick. Maybe what you need isn’t to push harder against that fence, but to step back and create a plan that will guide you through the writing process.
And always, just like Sophie coming to me when her power stick needs adjusting, it’s okay to seek help when you need it. You can learn more about the ways I support authors at souldrivenauthor.com.
