Writer’s Block. It sounds like a fearsome condition, a creative blockage. The end of invention. But what is it, really?
Part
of why Writer’s Block sounds so dreadful and insurmountable is the fact
that nobody ever takes it apart. People lump several different types of
creative problems into one broad category. In fact, there’s no such
thing as “Writer’s Block,” and treating a broad range of creative
slowdowns as a single ailment just creates something monolithic and
huge. Each type of creative slowdown has a different cause — and thus, a
different solution.
Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the
terrifying mystique of Writer’s Block, it’s better to take it apart and
understand it — and then conquer it. Here are 10 types of Writer’s Block
and how to overcome each type.
1. You can’t come up with an idea.
This is the kind where you literally have a blank page and you keep
typing and erasing, or just staring at the screen until Angry Birds
calls to you. You literally can’t even get started because you have no
clue what to write about, or what story you want to tell. You’re stopped
before you even start.
There
are two pieces of good news for anyone in this situation: 1) Ideas are
dime a dozen, and it’s not that hard to get the idea pump primed.
Execution is harder — of which more in a minute. 2) This is the kind of
creative stoppage where all of the typical “do a writing exercise”-type
stuff actually works. Do a ton of exercises, in fact. Try imagining what
it would be like if a major incident in your life had turned out way
differently. Try writing some fanfic, just to use existing characters as
“training wheels.” Try writing a scene where someone dies and someone
else falls in love, even if it doesn’t turn into a story. Think of
something or someone that pisses you off, and write a totally mean
satire or character assassination. (You’ll revise it later, so don’t
worry about writing something libelous at this stage.) Etc. etc. This is
the easiest problem to solve.
2. You have a ton of ideas but can’t commit to any of them, and they all peter out.
Now this is slightly harder. Even this problem can take a few different
forms — there’s the ideas that you lose interest in after a few
paragraphs, and then there’s the idea that you thought was a novel, but
it’s actually a short story. (More about that here.)
The thing is, ideas are dime a dozen — but ideas that get your creative
juices flowing are a lot rarer. Oftentimes, the coolest or most
interesting ideas are the ones that peter out fastest, and the dumbest
ideas are the ones that just get your motor revving like crazy. It’s
annoying, but can you do?
https://gizmodo.com/how-can-you-tell-if-your-novel-is-just-an-overgrown-sho-5678131
My
own experience is that usually, you end up having to throw all those
ideas out. If they’re not getting any traction, they’re not getting any
traction. Save them in a file, come back to them a year or ten later,
and maybe you’ll suddenly know how to tackle them. You’ll have more
experience and a different mindset then. It’s possible someone with more
stubbornness could make one of those idea work right away, but probably
not — the reason you can’t get anywhere with any of them is because
they’re just not letting you tell the story you really want to tell,
down in the murky subconscious.
The good news? Usually when I’m
faced with the “too many ideas, none of them works” problem, I’m a few
days away from coming up with the idea that does work, like gangbusters.
Your mind is working in overdrive, and it’s close to hitting the
jackpot.
3. You have an outline but you can’t get through this one part of it.
Some writers work really well with an outline, some don’t. For some
writers, the point of having an outline is to have a road to drive off, a
straight line to deviate from as far as possible. Plus, every project
is different — even if you’re an outline fan usually, there’s always the
possibility that you need to grope in the dark for this one particular
story.
Actually, there are two different reasons you could be getting stuck:
1) Your outline has a major flaw and you just won’t admit it. You can’t
get from A to C, because B makes no sense. The characters won’t do the
things that B requires them to do, without breaking character. Or the
logic of the story just won’t work with B. If this is the case, you
already know it, and it’s just a matter of attacking your outline with a
hacksaw.
2) Your outline is basically fine, but there’s a part that you can’t get
past. Because it’s boring, or because you just can’t quite see how to
get from one narrative peak to the next. You have two cool moments, and
you can’t figure out how to get from one cool bit to the other. (More on
that here.)
https://gizmodo.com/how-do-you-bridge-the-gap-between-two-cool-moments-in-y-5409660
In
either case, there’s nothing wrong with taking a slight detour, or
going off on a tangent, and seeing what happens. Maybe you’ll find a
cooler transition between those two moments, maybe you’ll figure out
where your story really needs to go next. And most likely, there’s
something that needs to happen with your characters at this point in the
story, and you haven’t hit on it yet.
4. You’re stuck in the middle and have no idea what happens next.
Sort of the opposite of problem #3.
Either you don’t have an outline, or you ditched it a while back.
Actually, here’s what seems to happen a lot – you were on a roll the day
before, and you wrote a whole lot of promising developments and clever
bits of business. And then you open your Word document today, and… you
have no idea where this is going. You thought you left things in a
great place to pick up the ball and keep running, and now you can’t even
see the next step.
If
it’s true that you were on a roll, and now you’re stuck, then chances
are you just need to pause and rethink, and maybe go back over what you
already wrote. You may just need a couple days to recharge. Or you may
need to rethink what you already wrote.
If you’ve been stuck in
the middle for a while, though, then you probably need to do something
to get the story moving again. Introduce a new complication, throw the
dice, or twist the knife. Mark Twain spent months stuck in the middle of
Huckleberry Finn before he came up with the notion of having Huck and
Jim take the wrong turn on the river and get lost. If you’re stuck for a
while, it may be time to drop a safe on someone.
5. You have a terrible feeling your story took a wrong turn a hundred pages back, and you only just hit a dead end.
This is the worst. You made a decision that felt bold and clever – you
threw the dice and dropped a safe on someone – and now you’re realizing
that you made a horrible mistake and you’ve gone off course. Worse, you
can see where your story should be right about now, if you hadn’t made that dreadful error.
If
you’re absolutely sure that you’ve gone the wrong way, then there’s no
point in going forward any further. Is there any alternative to
rewinding all the way to the original mistake and starting from there?
Yes, but it might suck. Sometimes, if you can see clearly what your
story ought to be like at this juncture, you can just keep going from
here, as if you had gone the right way in the first place. Thus
leaving yourself a giant hole that you’ll have to go back and plug
later. You can also rewind partially, going back 50 pages instead of 100
and then pretending you made the right choice originally.
In
either case, though, beware – you’re going to end up with two alternate
timelines in your story, and it’s up to you to keep straight what
happened in the timeline you’re sticking with, as opposed to the one
you’re discarding.
6. You’re bored with all these characters, they won’t do anything.
You created these bold, vibrant characters, and now you’ve written
dozens of pages… about them brushing their teeth and feeding their
cats.
Let’s
start with the obvious: characters who don’t do anything aren’t
interesting characters. Either what you’ve got here are just your
supporting cast, and you haven’t created your main character yet, or you
haven’t found the thing that your characters really want, or the
conflict that will spur them into action. You have some characters, but
not a story, not yet.
https://gizmodo.com/one-of-your-crucial-characters-isnt-working-what-do-yo-5408822
Sometimes you have to find the knife before you can twist the knife.
The
good news is, sometimes writing a few dozen pages of nothing much
happening can be super valuable – you’re getting into the world, and
you’re working out for yourself what these characters are about. It’s
entirely possible that once you’ve done that, a conflict will present
itself, or one minor character will suddenly start looking like your
protagonist. Just be prepared to toss out all these pages after that
happens. (As you probably will with almost everything in a first draft,
anyway.)
7. You keep imagining all the reasons people are going to say your story sucks, and it paralyzes you.
Otherwise known as the Inner Critic – you can’t make any choices,
because you keep imagining how someone at GoodReads will tear you apart
for it later. Actually, the person at GoodReads doesn’t exist, and it’s
just your own internal critic talking here. You’ll need that inner voice
of scorn for later, when you’re revising – but while you’re working on a
first draft, you have to drown it out, possibly with loud Finnish death
metal.
Chances are the ideas you’re putting down aren’t nearly as
bad as your darkest fears tell you they might be. But in any case, you
can always fix it in rewrites. (Although this does mean that you’ll have
to be twice as harsh when it comes to revising the thing – that’s the
bargain you make when you write a quick first draft with an eye to
revising later.)
8. You can’t think of the right words for what you’re trying to convey in this one paragraph.
I’ve had this one – I know what I’m doing, and where I’m going next, and
the story is humming along. But I can’t move forward until I find just
the right verb in this one sentence, and I spend a whole day’s writing
time staring at the screen and trying to figure it out. This seems like a
silly waste of time – just use the wrong verb for now, fix it in
rewrites! – except that sometimes hitting on the right word is partly a
matter of visualizing the scene in your head. Plus, what if this happens
during rewrites?
There’s nothing wrong with spending a day or two
fussing over one sentence. It may seem like a waste of time, it may
feel like you’re stuck – but actually, you’re just paying close
attention to your writing and to the way you’re depicting the scene. If
this goes on for a week, though, just pick a verb and move on.
9. You had this incredibly cool story in your head, and now you’re turning it into words on a screen and it’s suddenly dumb.
Is this your inner critic talking? Are you sure? Are you really sure?
Okay
then. It’s possible you’re actually seeing a real problem with your
idea, and with the execution. And, you know, there’s nothing wrong with
abandoning a novel and starting afresh. Sometimes these dead
half-finished novels serve as great fertilizer for the awesome novel
you’re going to end up writing.
But don’t give up too fast. It’s
possible that part of your idea is salvageable, or that the idea is genuinely cool and you’ve gotten yourself stuck into a weak execution of
it. Sometimes it’s helpful to step back and write a synopsis of the
stuff you’ve already written, so you can see how it fits together and
whether there are some buried parts that should be turning points in the
story. Sometimes it’s helpful to try writing bits of your story from a
different character’s point of view, to see how they look from another
vantagepoint.
https://gizmodo.com/8-unstoppable-rules-for-writing-killer-short-stories-366707
10. You’re revising your work, and you can’t see your way past all those blocks of text you already wrote.
Revising is a nightmare – and if you’ve adhered to the “write a first
draft quickly and then fix it in rewrites” school of thought, you’ve
agreed to a Faustian bargain. There’s no way to make this process go
faster or more smoothly, a lot of the time. Sometimes it takes a while
of looking at your text from different angles to figure out where the
problems are, and sometimes you need more feedback from more people to
figure out where the real structural weaknesses are.
I’m going to
go out on a limb and say that if you’re getting stuck during revisions,
that’s not any type of Writer’s Block (as nebulous a concept as Writer’s
Block is), but rather just the natural process of trying to diagnose
what ails your novel.
Although one thing that works for me when
I’m getting stuck with revisions is just to rewrite large sections from
scratch, without looking back at your original draft. Same story, new
words. Sometimes, it’s a lot quicker than trying to wrangle the words
you already put down.
Want more writing advice? Check out io9’s free advice page.
Pulp magazine images via Toyranch, Sukrat Lord Dub and Walker9 on Flickr.
This io9 Flashback previously appeared in 2010.
