The deadline does not care that the week was bad. The page, six hours in, remains stubbornly, uncooperatively blank.
Six hours into a blank page today, a deadline looming for a humor piece I am supposed to have finished by tomorrow morning, and I am genuinely starting to question one of the fundamental assumptions I have built an entire freelance career around, that I can reliably produce funny writing on a fixed schedule regardless of what kind of week I have actually been having personally, an assumption this particular week has tested about as thoroughly as any week in recent memory.
It has been, without getting into the specific, genuinely difficult personal details that do not belong in a piece meant for public consumption, one of the more difficult weeks I have had in a good while, and I think the honest, uncomfortable truth I am sitting with tonight is that humor, for me at least, does not simply switch on reliably regardless of underlying emotional state the way I have generally assumed it does across most of my career so far. I have written funny pieces before during genuinely difficult personal stretches, and I think I had, somewhere along the way, built a specific professional identity around exactly that resilience, the reliable ability to produce comedy on schedule regardless of what is actually happening underneath it.
This particular week has quietly, uncomfortably disproven that assumption, six hours of staring at a blank document, several false starts each abandoned within a paragraph or two, ideas that read, on rereading, as flat and forced in a way I do not think would have struck me as flat during a genuinely better week, a specific kind of misalignment between my current emotional state and the deliberately light, absurdist register my usual writing voice depends on.
I called my editor this evening, earlier than I would normally reach out about a looming deadline, to be honest about the situation rather than simply pushing through and submitting something I already suspect will read as forced and considerably weaker than my usual work. She was genuinely understanding, more understanding than I fully expected given how tight this particular week’s publishing schedule already is, offering either a short extension or the option of swapping in a different, already-finished piece from my backlog for this week’s slot, freeing this specific difficult piece to actually wait until I am in a genuinely better place to write it properly.
I think there is something worth naming honestly here about the specific mythology around comedy writers and performers more broadly, the well-worn narrative of the sad clown, funny material produced precisely because of, or in spite of, real underlying difficulty, a narrative I have absorbed more thoroughly than I fully realized until tonight’s six hours of blank page forced me to actually test it against my own current, genuine experience. That narrative, tonight at least, does not hold up especially well against the reality of simply sitting here, exhausted and genuinely struggling, watching a cursor blink on an empty document that refuses to cooperate no matter how long I stare at it.
I am taking the extension my editor offered, and I am choosing, tonight, to treat that choice as a genuinely reasonable professional decision rather than some kind of personal failure to simply push through the way the sad-clown mythology suggests a real comedy writer should always be able to manage regardless of circumstance. Humor, I am relearning tonight after apparently forgetting it somewhere across a fairly fortunate stretch of easier weeks, actually does require something resembling genuine internal space to work from, and this particular week simply is not offering me that space right now.
I will write the piece properly once that space actually returns, whenever that turns out to be, and I suspect, once it does, the eventual finished piece will be considerably better for having waited rather than for having been forced out, flat and joyless, against a deadline that never should have taken priority over simply being honest about not currently having the piece in me to write well.
I think tonight has genuinely changed how I plan to talk about my own working process going forward, less performed resilience and more honest acknowledgment that this specific craft, whatever its reputation for producing comedy out of difficulty, actually seems to require something closer to a baseline of internal stability to function well for me personally. I do not know if that is true for every humor writer, and I suspect the sad-clown mythology persists precisely because it is genuinely true for some. It is simply, tonight, not true for me, and I think admitting that plainly, rather than quietly pretending otherwise, is worth more to my actual long-term career than pushing through one difficult deadline at the cost of the piece’s actual quality.
My editor’s graciousness tonight matters more than I think I properly conveyed to her on the phone, and I intend to write her a proper thank-you note tomorrow, once I have had some actual sleep, for treating this specific kind of honesty as a reasonable professional request rather than something to be quietly judged or held against me going forward.
More from this author at Violet Woolf, prat.uk.