Writer Voodoo

It's a little like magic...

The Void Doesn’t Give a Fuck About Your Schedule

It’s 3 AM and I’m staring at the screen like it’s a hole in reality and something on the other side is staring back. The cursor blinks. One, two, three. A digital heartbeat measuring the seconds between me and failure.

How do you pull something from nothing? How do you reach into that static-filled space behind your eyes and drag out something another human being might actually want to read?

The real question nobody asks: what happens when the void stops talking back?

I’ve spent years—combat zones and monastery cells and dive bar bathrooms at 2 PM on a Tuesday—trying to figure out what makes certain ideas stick and others dissolve like smoke. Not because I’m some creative guru with the answer. I don’t have the answer. What I have is scar tissue and observation and a decade of watching the machine work when it works and seize up when it doesn’t.

The work will happen or it won’t.

That’s the first thing. You can’t force it. You can build conditions where it’s more likely to show up but you can’t summon it like some parlor trick. The muse is a feral cat—it comes when it comes and you’d better have something for it when it arrives or it’ll fuck off for a month.

Here’s what I know from practice:

Every morning I sit with coffee that tastes like burnt earth and I stare at nothing for ten minutes. Not meditation. Not mindfulness porn. Just staring. Letting the static clear. And sometimes—not always, but sometimes—something surfaces. An image. A phrase. The ghost of an idea that might become something if I don’t spook it.

The trick is you have to actually give a shit about what you’re making. I cannot overstate this. If you’re bored writing it, the reader will be comatose reading it. You’re not just moving words around. You’re building a little reality and inviting someone else inside. If that reality feels empty to you, it’ll feel like a mausoleum to them.

The work will happen or it won’t.

But you can load the dice.

Look around. Not through the screen. Through actual windows at actual streets where actual humans are doing actual things. The world is writing itself constantly—births and deaths and betrayals and small mercies happening in real time while you’re scrolling through the same five websites wondering why nothing feels real anymore.

Step outside your content bubble. The algorithm is eating your brain. It’s designed to. Every platform wants you trapped in a narrower and narrower tunnel of confirmation until you can’t see anything but what you already believe. Break out. Read things you disagree with. Talk to people who aren’t in your tribe. The edges are where the interesting stuff lives.

And for fuck’s sake, have a life outside the work. This seems obvious but apparently it’s not. Go drink with friends. Eat food that doesn’t come from a delivery app. Touch grass. Hold someone’s hand. Have sex. Experience the full catastrophic beauty of being alive in a body on a planet spinning through infinite darkness. Stories come from living, not from other stories about living.

When you sit down to write, just start. Doesn’t matter if you know where it’s going. The destination reveals itself in the walking. You stumble forward until you find what feels like an ending—and then you go back and fix all the places where you lied to yourself. First draft is always garbage. That’s the deal. You’re shoveling dirt looking for diamonds and most of it’s just dirt. Edit. Then edit again. Then let someone else tell you where it’s still broken. Then fix that too.

But—and this is critical—the work will happen or it won’t, and it definitely won’t happen if you never show up.

Schedule time. Not “when inspiration strikes.” Not “when I feel ready.” Actual time. Realistic time. Sustainable time. The muse rewards consistency, not heroic effort. You can write every day for 30 minutes or you can write in manic 12-hour binges that burn you out for weeks. I know which one actually produces finished work.

Write down every idea the moment it arrives. I’ve lost more good concepts to “I’ll remember this later” than I have to actual incompetence. Your phone exists. Use it. Voice memo, notes app, text yourself, I don’t care. Capture it before it dissolves back into the static.

And here’s the thing nobody wants to hear: everything is a story. Your product launch. Your recipe. Your Twitch stream. Your fucking tax return. Humans are story-processing machines. We can’t help it. The brain evolved to find patterns and meaning and narrative in everything because that’s how we survived when the shadows might contain predators. So stop fighting it. Figure out the story you’re telling and tell it better than the noise.

Finally—and I mean this—you have to let yourself not work sometimes. Read the book you’ve been avoiding. Paint something stupid. Walk until your feet hurt. Stare at clouds. Kiss someone. Do literally anything that isn’t related to the hustle. The machine needs maintenance. You keep running it at redline and it’ll burn out. Trust me on this.

Writing is ritual and voodoo and mechanical repetition all mixed together. You find what works and you do it until it stops working and then you find something else. The only actual failure is quitting entirely.

The void is always there. Sometimes it whispers. Sometimes it screams. Sometimes it goes silent for weeks and you think maybe it’s gone forever.

It’s not gone.

You just have to keep showing up until it decides to talk again.

Minimal Inbox, Maximum Value. Niche of One.