What Bob Dylan Can Teach Writers About Losing (and Finding) Your Creative Magic

You pull up a chapter you wrote months ago or years ago, read it, and think:

Woah.

I wrote that?

That’s really good!

It’s a great moment, until an unnerving thought creeps in:

Can I still write like that?

You suddenly wonder if you’re losing your creative magic.

A writer in my community told me exactly this recently. It felt like someone else had written the chapter, and he asked, “What if I can’t keep doing that?”

Almost every writer faces this fear eventually, and Bob Dylan’s story is the best illustration I know.

The Voice of a Generation Who Didn’t Want the Job

In the 1960s, Bob Dylan released a flood of extraordinary work, and the media called him “the voice of a generation.” He got tired of that pretty quickly.

So at the height of his rock-and-roll stardom, he released the country music album, Nashville Skyline. People still loved him. Then, in 1970, he released Self Portrait, a double album that critics widely considered an utter mess. Greil Marcus opened his Rolling Stone review with the now-legendary line “What is this shit?”

Dylan later told Rolling Stone in 1984 that it was deliberate: he wanted to push away his most obsessive fans with something they couldn’t relate to, so they’d leave him alone.

The Problem With Natural Talent

Dylan wanted out of the spotlight, but when he later tried to write at his old level again, he found, by his own account, that he didn’t know how to do it anymore.

Joan Baez, who knew him in the mid-’60s, wrote in her memoir, And a Voice to Sing With, that Dylan was “turning out songs like ticker tape.” It had all been intuitive, natural talent. He never really knew how he did it, so when he tried to do it on purpose, there was nothing to hold onto.

Learning to Do It on Purpose

Getting back took Dylan years.

In 1974 he started studying painting with Norman Raeben in New York, and in a 1978 interview with Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone, he credited Raeben with putting his mind, hand, and eye together.

Those years were a period of learning to do intentionally what he had always done intuitively. It was a long road, but he recaptured the power of his early work with Blood on the Tracks in 1975.

Why This Matters for Your Writing

If you’re a few books in and wondering whether the magic is gone, you’re in good company. Here’s what I take from Dylan’s story.

Early on, naivety is a gift. When you’re writing your first book, you can shoot for the stars because you don’t know what isn’t possible yet. A decade into your career, you have far more understanding, experience, and insight, but it’s a different stage.

Different stages bring different challenges. Just as different drafts of a book present different problems, so do different stages of an author’s career. Several writers I coach have told me their second book felt like one long flow state, while the third got hard again because the novelty was gone. They’ve entered a new stage of their writing career.

Intuition can be named and learned. This is what I try to do with much of the craft I teach: give you names and frameworks for things you may already be doing. Plenty of pantsers have come to me after finishing a first draft, and when I mention story structure, they say, “Story what now?” But then they look at their manuscript and realize, “Oh, my book has three acts.” They did it intuitively, because they love words and stories.

Learning the craft doesn’t kill the magic. It means you can do on purpose what used to happen by accident, and fill the gaps in the areas where intuition doesn’t come naturally.

So, Is the Magic Gone?

I don’t want to say “welcome to the hard part,” because it’s all hard, but even after three, four, or even ten books, you’ll sometimes wonder if you’re losing it and that’s normal.

The answer is to do what Bob Dylan did: study your craft until you can reach for the good stuff deliberately.

Try This: Reverse-Engineer Your Best Chapter

Pull up the chapter that made you think, Wait, I wrote that? Then take it apart. What did the character want in that scene? What stood in the way? What changed by the end? Where did you raise a question for the reader, and where did you answer it?

Studying the magic doesn’t have to kill it. In fact, naming what you did on instinct lets you do it again, this time with purpose, when instinct goes quiet.

Want help turning your instincts into tools you can use on demand? Book a free call with a writing coach, and we’ll look at where your book is, what’s getting in the way, and what your next step should be. Prefer to look around first? Here are my programs.