Defeating Writer's Block: Part 2

I've met many obstacles since I started writing daily over two years ago. Writer's block isn't a single affliction. It's a group of mental obstructions that can delay or derail the creative process.

Writer's block has as many cures as forms. Charlie Jane Anders gives some practical advice for dealing with each head of this hydra. I'll synthesize these suggestions with advice from other writers and my own experience.

1. Lack/Glut of Ideas: I'm distilling Anders' first two types of writer's block into one point since they both deal with ideas. Whether you have no ideas (a rare problem, as discussed previously) or can't decide between myriad ideas, coming up with the right story premise is best handled by writing.

Sound backwards? Priming your creative juices with a little freestyle, stream of consciousness, or observational composition can unearth buried gems.

2. Narrative Flow Problems: once again I find it's useful to combine issues dealing with a story's narrative thread. If you get stuck at any point after starting a project, first make sure you're not being hypercritical. Get someone else to read the story thus far. If your alpha reader can't make sense of things, proceed to phase two: rewrite from the departure point.

3. Character Issues: if you find your characters difficult to write, chances are you haven't motivated them properly. "Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water." The soul of a story is the interplay between what the characters want, the obstacles in their way, and how they overcome those obstacles.

Know your characters' motives. Then make sure their actions are consistent with those motives.

4. Stage Fright: if fretting over what people will think is stopping you from telling your story, I have bad news for you. No matter what you write, someone is going to hate it. Writing professionally isn't about pleasing everyone. It's about producing to a certain standard.

To paraphrase Neil Gaiman, if you aren't afraid that you've shared too much of yourself, you're doing it wrong.

The author is the person least qualified to judge what others will think. Get a few alpha readers to peruse the first draft. Listen to their feedback. Then draft a second version and give it to your beta readers. Repeat.

5. Editing Hang-ups: some writers love free composition and hate editing. Others agonize over their first drafts but take to revisions like sharks to chum. The reason for this dichotomy is that writing and editing are two separate processes.

Revising a manuscript can be like pulling teeth to more right-brained types. That's how I felt until I realized the intoxicating power of deleting superfluous text. Liberate yourself from useless lines, paragraphs, and pages.

The editing dilemma that most afflicts me these days is verbal perfectionism. Nothing interrupts my writing flow like grasping for exactly the right word to describe the scene in my head. The most useful advice I've gotten on this front came from Nick Enlowe. Use a placeholder word, move on, and fix it in the next draft.

I hope you've found this series on writer's block enriching and entertaining. What are some of your own creative obstacles, and how have you handled them?

Defeating Writer's Block: Part 1

A question I'd probably be asked if I ever left my desk is, "How do you deal with writer's block?" That question is deceptively complex because people who don't practice writing as a discipline often have a different idea of the creative process than those who systematically make stuff up. I know because I labored under these misguided notions until quite recently.

In order to field this question we'll have to nail down the semantics. I've found that many laymen imagine the writing process to be the act of transcribing fully formed stories dictated by some mysterious idea vending machine. That's only partially true.

Creative people aren't Pythian mediums or hosts for the loa. Anyone with the capacity for language can tell stories. The fact is that of the 200 million aspiring novelists in this country, only a small minority realize that writing stories well is an acquired skill. Even fewer take the time to hone that skill.

So, what most people mean when they ask how to beat writer's block is, "How do you write when you're not inspired?" Or worse, "How do you make inspiration happen?" The answer to the first question is, "You write." The answer to the second question is, "You don't need to."

Writing isn't a mystical charism. It's a technical artistic discipline that takes thousands of hours to perfect. It makes no more sense to ask a writer how he can produce fiction while uninspired than it does to ask an IT technician how he can install a network while uninspired.

Many people mistake coming up with a great idea and executing it well for inspiration, which is actually quite rare. The reason that 60 percent of the population aspires to authorship is that everyone has lots of ideas all the time. They assume that coming up with a story premise is the hard part.

Ideas are cheap. Professional execution is a grueling ordeal. Writing isn't a shortcut to an easy living. It's a lifelong commitment to a craft.

That's my experience. What's yours?