It is the very rare person who can escape a writing career without ever encountering the writing block. It has happened to me, and it has happened to every other writer I have ever had the chance to speak with. There are as many forms of writing blocks as there are people, and even the best writers will encounter it from time to time.
I used to suffer from writing block frequently. This would result in me writing in fits and bursts, and the fits would often last far, far longer than the bursts of writing. This changed over the years until the fits were mostly controlled and planned for, while the bursts were sustained work at writing.
It wasn’t easy, and I won’t lie and tell you that these tricks will be an instant cure-all. They won’t be. They might help you get better at writing along the way. They might even help you sustain your bursts of writing to last months instead of days, or days instead of hours. What they will do is show you how I managed to make my bursts last longer, and show you how I can bring non-writing fits to a halt.
I have two major excuses for not writing.
Excuse #1: I can’t think of what to write.
Cause: For me, if I am saying I can’t think of what to write, it usually is due to one of several things. I’ll make a nice, pretty list here.
- I have a plot hole.
- I don’t like the character(s) I’m writing about.
- I don’t know where I’m going with the story.
- I don’t care about the story.
- I’m in editor mode.
I’ll delve a little deeper into these things and why they are problems for me.
1. I have a plot hole
This has actually become a part of my method of writing. If I can’t pick up where I left off within an hour, I start looking for plot holes. I lose an hour here, but I fix it so I’m not stuck later on. Sometimes, the hour and ten minutes I lose fixing something now saves me days of lost writing time (or lengthy rewrites) later.
2. I don’t like the character(s) I’m writing about.
This is one of the hardest things for me to encounter. It often results in the scrapping of a story — for now — and shoved into the inactive folder. While this is labeled at #2, this doesn’t happen all that often… because I don’t get far writing about characters I don’t like or care about. Even the villains. Sometimes it is just the way it is to abandon a book (for now) because I can’t get behind the characters. And yes, readers know when that is the case, at least for me and the people who read my writing.
3. I don’t know where I’m going with the story.
This is a more common problem with me, and something that resulted in a general change in how I write. If I don’t know what the end goal of the antagonist is, how can I know what challenges the protagonists will encounter? I may not know the exact specifics of the ending, but I know what the goals of the characters are. If I don’t know this, I end up drooling at my computer monitor and questioning why I’m trying to write in the first place.
I try to know my conflict, climax, and resolution now before I start writing.
These are my quick thoughts on conflict, climax, and resolution just so we’re on the same page.
Conflict: The major driving force behind the book. The source of antagonism between the characters. It can be nature versus man, man versus man, man versus society… or many other things. But you should have something that doesn’t sit well with the characters and drives them forward.
In Lord of the Rings, one of the major conflicts was the possession of the Ring. The Protagonists had it, and the Antagonists wanted it.
Climax: The moment of truth. The moment where it could go either way. In the Lord of the Rings, it was the moment where Frodo hesitated at discarding the Ring on Mount Doom.
Resolution: How did the moment of truth resolve? It doesn’t have to be a good thing for the protagonists. In Lord of the Rings, Gollum bit of Frodo’s finger with the Ring and they fell into Mount Doom.
If I don’t know these things, I often get stuck. I need things for my characters to be challenged with, and someone in the background pulling the strings.
This won’t work for everyone, but it does work for me.
4. I don’t care about the story.
The same with not caring about the characters — if I don’t care about what the characters are doing, I won’t finish the book. If it bores me, how will this story entertain others? I read for pleasure, and if I’m not pleased by my own writing, I can’t expect anyone else to be pleased with it either.
5. Editor mode is turned to on.
Making something perfect is for edits. But, sometimes, I just am in the mood to edit. This doesn’t happen to me that often anymore, but it took a lot of discipline and hard work to change that. There is no easy way to turn the editor off except through experience at doing it. If you want to turn your editor off, don’t edit. Unfortunately, that doesn’t usually work for me. If I need to get the editor off, I go critique something. This feeds me editor and helps me as a writer. It may mean I spend an afternoon critiquing, but when I do this, I am also able to get back into the mode to write on my own stories after reading others stories.
That was a surprisingly long analysis of one aspect of writer’s block for me. Ouch.
Next up to bat:
Excuse #2: I don’t want to write.
This is laziness, pure and simple. It means I don’t want to earn my keep, I don’t want to do my job, and that I’m being lazy, lazy, lazy. There is no excuse. There is no cure beyond willpower and doing what I should be doing and not what I want to be doing. Bluntly, if my excuse is, “I don’t want to write”, it is because I am being a lazy scum and should get to work doing what I should be doing. I want writing to be a job, and that means working even when I don’t necessarily want to work.
Don’t think there is anything else I need to say on that one. If there is any reason other than laze for not wanting to write, it is best addressed in the I don’t know what to write category, not the ‘I’m a lazy person’ category.
I can’t hold your hand, but I hope that you might get something out of how my brain works. At the end of the day, resolving your writing blocks is your responsibility. Every person has a different method of writing, and what may work for me won’t necessarily work for you.
Good luck.