Why writer’s block?

Everyone has heard of writer’s block. And I don’t just mean other writers, I mean pretty much anyone you meet will likely have heard of the term.

A random thought occurred to me, though. Why writer’s block? Why do we never hear of painter’s block, or sculptor’s block, or trombonist’s block, or any of a number of other artistic blocks? Is this affliction unique to writers?

It seems it’s not. Looking into artistic blocks, creative people all over the place complain about dry spells, about lack of creativity, lack of inspiration. And there’s a lot of advice on how to deal with these ailments, and much of it has parallels with techniques I wrote about in Breaking the Block. So it seems it’s widespread, it just hasn’t got a name.

Except for writers.

So why writers, in particular?

I wonder if it has anything to do with another oddity about writing.

Least likely conversation to hear at a dinner party: “Oh, you’re a concert pianist! How interesting. I thought of doing that too, just haven’t got around to it yet.”

Substitute “writer” for “concert pianist” and it suddenly turns into a frequently-heard conversation. So many people admire the talent of painters and musicians because so many people happily profess to being useless at art, or tone deaf. And yet everyone seems to be a budding novelist, as if writing is the easiest thing in the world.

Now, all the creative arts acknowledge that practitioners go through rough patches, where output dries up. They acknowledge that creativity and capturing creativity in a tangible form is darned hard work, and it doesn’t always go smoothly. But along with that, in all the other arts learning the craft comes first. Claiming your musical creativity has dried up kinda lacks credibility if you’ve never played a note before in your life.

But writing is different. With so many people thinking it’s easy, that they can casually “give it a go”, they look for a reason when it turns out not to be so straightforward. So I wonder if writer’s block emerged as a fallback for people who tried, but got stuck. Because nobody can really admit to not being able to write, but they can say they are actually a writer, really, but the lack of output is because they are suffering from the dreaded writer’s block.

What do you think? Plausible? Or bunkum?

Breaking the Block

While I’m taking a breather from The Long Dark, waiting for the first part to get critiqued, I’ve turned my attention back to another small project that I aim to complete this summer.

A short e-book, Breaking the Block, looks systematically at a range of causes of writer’s block, and suggests possible remedies.

I’ve tried to pack the booklet with examples and practical tips, but the theme running through it is that writer’s block is not in itself an ailment, but simply the visible symptom of some deeper underlying cause.

It often seems to me that writers feel helpless when the words stop flowing, and they believe they have to wait for inspiration or for the right mood to strike. My belief is that the problem can be tackled more proactively, you just need some ideas on where to look for the source of the blockage before you can bring the right countermeasures to bear.

Even if you don’t find a specific tip in the booklet that helps you in your own situation, I think it helps to adopt the mindset that writer’s block is not some amorphous ailment of the writerly mind. Instead of feeling helpless, understand that somewhere there is a specific cause that can be overcome once you’ve shone a spotlight on it.

Unblocking plot - what happens next?

It’s been a while since I posted on writer’s block. I had a whole series of posts mapped out, then April got in the way. I find that during the A to Z challenge most folks are so busy with the challenge itself that few have time to visit elsewhere, so I gave myself a few weeks off posting anything other than Weekend Writing Warriors snippets.

But now, after a really good three months keeping to (and ahead of) my writing goals on The Ashes of Home, I’m hitting a sticky patch. It’s my old Nemesis - plot.

Of all the aspects of crafting a story, I think this is the part that gives me the most trouble. Figuring out where the story is going, what happens next, and what twists to introduce to liven things up.

I have a few tools to help, but no silver bullet and this part is still a struggle for me.

I find it helps to sit down to a dedicated brainstorming session, usually drawn out on paper as a mind map. Throw thoughts down on the page without judgment, let them spark and collide off each other, then sift through the wreckage for anything useable.

Other background preparation can help here. If you know your characters, how would they act or react? Use that to drive events forward. If you’ve mapped out details in your setting beyond the obvious needs of the story, features in your characters’ surroundings (that you placed there but hadn’t paid much attention to) can suggest actions or plot twists: places to hide, to escape, to ambush...

Sometimes the brainstorming might be tightly directed: the protagonist is in a fix, so how do they get out? Sometimes the challenge might be more vague. Right now, I’ve just had Shayla framed for a crime and under house arrest, and it will be a week or two of story time before the next firm piece of the story kicks in. Meanwhile, is she going to just sit there meekly and let fate take its course? No. But at this point I have no idea what she’s going to do instead, which makes it very hard to write.

When I’m stuck on “what happens next”, I sometimes find that the thread I’m working on has run ahead of other point of view threads. It’s a bit like leading a charge at the enemy and finding yourself all alone with your comrades lagging far behind. The answer to that is easier. Go back and write those other threads. Where I’m following multiple points of view I usually manage to keep them in step, writing a scene in one then swapping to another. I often have a feeling for the points where I want to leave the reader hanging, and I know what scene I want to cut to. But at other times I find it better to just write two threads as separate continuous stories, then splice them together. That’s when the problem of running ahead can crop up.

There is a related but more subtle problem that can crop up to block me. When I’m struggling and I tease apart the reasons, the answer may be that there should be events happening off stage that I’ve neglected to map out. These won’t be point of view scenes in the story, but they will make themselves felt when their arcs intersect. Paying attention to what people are doing while they are out of sight can help unblock the flow.

Do you find it easy to come up with plot twists and keep the action flowing? If not, what techniques do you use to overcome this?

Unblocking characters

Whereas the setting helps frame the action and avoids it all happening in a vacuum, the characters are what really bring the story to life. Often, when I find myself blocked, it’s because I don’t properly understand my characters.

At this point, the avid plotters will be wagging their fingers at me and gesticulating to their inch-think binder of lovingly alphabetized five-page-long character sheets. “Fill these out,” they cry, “and all will be well.”

“Nuts!” I reply. “That doesn’t work for me.”

Now, it’s important to remember that there is no right or wrong here. This is a game of try stuff out and find what works for you. One writer’s block-busting technique will often be another writer’s Muse-poison. You might find character sheet templates a boon, I happen not to.

What I do pay attention to is what drives a character. That may be rooted in their backstory, their affiliations, a particular trait ... when I get stuck, one of the things to explore is whether I’ve got a good handle on main and secondary characters’ drivers.

Sometimes it’s possible to simply sit down and list things out - the character sheet approach - but sometimes a bit more subtlety is needed to trick characters into revealing themselves.

I’ve blogged before about character interviews. I find this a great tool to help get into a character’s mind, and some surprising insights can come out. Things that you, the writer, never knew were there.

A related approach is to summarize the main gist of the story in a few paragraphs from each character’s point of view. Bring it alive to them - what is their part in it?

My current WIP was stuck in limbo for ages until I tried a variation on this theme. I listed out the main individuals and alliances, and for each one wrote out: what was motivating them, what their goal was in the story, and how they planned to reach that goal. That has since developed into a changing chart over time as goals collide and unfolding events either help or thwart them. Understanding the original motivation and goals is helping to flesh out realistic responses to events as they play out.

I’m sure there are lots of other tricks to help unlock a character’s mind. What suggestions do you have?

Unblocking setting

I’ve said before that I’m an extremely visual person, and this shows up in my writing process. Sometimes I can write actions and dialogue and even descriptions in a vacuum, but only up to a point. Eventually I’ll grind to a halt without something more substantial to anchor my mind.

I write best when I can picture the scene with an almost cinematic quality. When I’m struggling, it’s often because I haven’t achieved this visual clarity, and the answer is often to get out pens and paper to solidify the surroundings.

Alongside the text of the novel I accumulate a binder of maps and plans, from whole worlds, to countries, towns, and individual buildings. I blogged about this a few years ago. As well as helping overcome blocks, these sketches bring other benefits. Once I’ve committed details to paper I can be confident that future scenes in the same setting will be consistent. Fleshing out the plans beyond the obvious needs of the story also suggests incidental details to bring descriptions alive. The mood of a scene is best expressed through a choice handful of finely-observed specifics than through any volume of vague generalities.

The simple act of drawing a map is often enough to keep the writing flowing. On rare occasions I might capture more detailed setting descriptions when I want to establish a specific mood or feel, though it’s usually enough to just draw out the framework and my mind can fill in the details on the fly. I don’t generally worry about consistency at this level because a detailed description of a setting usually only pops up in one place, and I can easily refer back to the text for later consistency.

Mostly, these notes are only sketchy and partial, just enough to allow me to move on. But I’m also slowly transferring them into iDraw to publish on my website.

Examples like this go way beyond the needs of the story, but I’m hoping this background material will be of interest to readers.

More on writer’s block

The sinking feeling staring at a blank page, and seeing it as a depressing reflection of my own mind.

Having too many thoughts flying through my mind, but they are elusive - the moment I reach to solidify one in words, it slips through my hands and I’m left grasping for the next, and the next...

Having a scene that I want to express, but unable to get past an obstacle - a word, a name, a description - and I’m writing, deleting, rewriting over and over unable to move on until I get it just right...

Finding endless excuses to avoid facing the manuscript and the prospect of writing.

Are any of these feelings familiar?

Writer’s block comes in many guises, none of them pleasant, all of them frustrating. All of them mean we are spinning our wheels not writing when we should be writing.

And there’s loads of advice and techniques out there for how to get around it. I talked last week about one of them - just keep writing - and why I don’t find it satisfactory on its own.

In order to employ “just keep writing” successfully, you need to be clear to yourself about exactly what you mean in this instance by “just keep writing” (because it can mean an awful lot of things) and understand what it is you expect to gain. More generally, people are rarely clear what’s going on when they experience writer’s block, so they try techniques in a haphazard way hoping that something will work. It’s like trying to cook a meal by pulling random implements off the shelf in the hope that one of them might prove useful.

I’ve come to the conclusion that these symptoms that we call writer’s block are simply signs of something deeper. My subconscious mind is usually (not always, but usually) telling me that I haven’t gained the necessary clarity about what I want to write. My response to this kind of block nowadays is to try to be more systematic, more scientific, in looking for the underlying issue. Rather than throw random solutions at the problem, I try to understand the problem first, and then choose a suitable tool from my toolkit to address it.

Conversely, I’ve noticed that when the words flow the easiest, I have a clear picture of the scene in my mind, of the characters involved, their goals, and their surroundings. That doesn’t mean I have everything in the story mapped out, though the larger plot can also be a stumbling block at times, that’s just the way I write. I can leap ahead and totally pants scenes that I envisage, and work out how to weave them into the big picture later.

On those occasions when I’ve been successful at meeting writing goals right through a first draft, my process includes just enough planning, plotting, and scene-setting to keep ahead of the writing curve. I try to sniff out the potential blockages and deal with them before they become a problem, or recognize when I’m hitting a sticky patch and ask myself what’s getting in my way.

Yes, sometimes I’ve also taken the advice to work on something else, to take time out. But nowadays I don’t look on that as a direct technique - as in “write something else and as a direct result you’ll miraculously find it easier to write this story”. I see it as an acknowledgment that although I have unfinished business with this story, the answer isn’t going to be forced. In other words, working on something else gives me time out so I can come back to the story with fresh eyes, but the underlying problem will still be there waiting to be solved.

What does writer’s block feel like to you, and what’s worked for you to overcome it?

Just keep writing...

And why that doesn’t cut it for me

There’s lots of writing advice that sounds simple on the surface, but is often misunderstood and actually opens up some pretty deep discussions at times. “Kill your darlings” and “Write what you know” spring to mind.

Now I’m into drafting a new novel, the dreaded writer’s block is always out there, on the periphery, haunting my efforts. I’ve experienced it before and it’s not fun.

Just want to say, I’m not in that position right now. I’ve just completed a third week staying on or ahead of target, long may it continue.

However, a discussion on Goodreads talked about “Keep writing”, which is often touted as the panacea for writer’s block, and to which I usually respond, “Bollocks it is!” And it got me thinking about the advice, and what writer’s block looks like, and how I’ve got around it or avoided it myself. I’ll come back to the latter in future posts, but ...

First off, the advice itself

What does it mean when people say “Keep writing”? Superficially it seems to suggest keep putting words down on paper and blast your way through the block. That’s the bit that I have trouble with because that just doesn’t work for me. It does work for some people (and good for them - I keep saying the only universal rule in writing is “do what works”, so if it works, it works) just not for me.

I’ve come to the conclusion that when I experience writer’s block, it is often a symptom of something deeper. It usually means that I don’t have a clear enough picture of something important, and that is causing a logjam. Logjams are typically not solved by piling on more logs.
But “keep writing” is more nuanced than that. There are many variations on the “keep writing” theme, and my “Aha!” moment was to realize that these variations are quite distinct tools that have all got lumped together under the “keep writing” banner. And on reflection I find I’ve done the variations myself, so perhaps it ain’t all that bad after all.

It can be used to mean...

Develop good writing habits: Not bad advice. However, given that the actual writing part of a novel is only about 10% of the total effort, I prefer to think of it as be professional and keep doing something productive towards your writing goals. Right now for me, yes, that means actual writing. But at other stages of the process it could equally mean research, critiquing, revising, preparing for publication...

Employ one of a range of writing techniques: Some people like to free-write to get their creative juices flowing, and sometimes the “keep writing” advice is given in that kind of vein - write anything, just to get the words flowing. This doesn’t work for me, but I do use a variety of other techniques that involve writing to get me past a blockage. I’ll talk about these in future posts, but suffice it to say, these are used as tools carefully selected from my toolkit to achieve specific results. One thing I don’t do is just write any random stuff for the sake of writing.

Write something else: Sometimes you need to distance yourself from a project before you can get it moving again. Yes, I’ve done this too, so it makes sense to me.

Don’t fret about marketing and write the next book: OK, this doesn’t address writer’s block, but it does speak to the trap we can easily fall into of sucking our time into non-productive efforts.

So, “keep writing” can mean lots of different things, which is probably why it gets so misunderstood. What does it mean to you?