Pro Tips on Beating the Block

On Facebook, my friend Sarah shared Rookie Magazine‘s article “Getting Unstuck: Writers’ Thoughts on Writer’s Block,” and there is so much great advice in it, I had to share it here.

Because I’m a huge Browncoat and a fan of all things Joss Whedon, my favorite part is advice:

I wasn’t sure how to start this, so I did anyway. I’ve faced plenty of writer’s block in my time, though maybe less than some. I’ll lay out whatever rules for dealing with it that come to me. I think I’ve already laid out the first.

Control your environment. No one comes or goes. You’re alone, with enough time not only to write but to fall into the place of writing, which can take a while. No internet, no phone. Play music. It can amp the mood and separate you from the people on the other side of the door. (I listen to movie scores when I write. Nothing with lyrics—too distracting. Modern movie scores are very drone-y, in a good way for writers. Just sustained emotion. Hans Zimmer, Rachel Portman, Carter Burwell, Mychael Danna…there’s tons.) Make sure your desk faces the right way. (I have to face the room, not the wall.) Not too much clutter…it all matters.

Start writing. You can overthink anything. You can wind yourself up into a frenzy of inertia by letting a blank page stay blank. Write something on it. (Don’t draw something on it. The moment I doodle on a page I know nothing else will ever go on it. The blank page is scary, but it’s also sacred. Don’t mar it.) Anything can be rewritten—except nothing.

Be specific. You want to write something. Why? What exactly are you going for? Whether you’re at the beginning or the middle or the last damn sentence of something, you need to know exactly what you’re after. Verisimilitude? Laughter? Pain? Something that rhymes with orange? Whatever it is, be very cold about being able to break it down, so even if you walk away, you walk away with a goal.

Stop writing. Know when to walk away, when you’re grinding gears. This is tricky, because it’s easy to get lazy, but sometimes straining for inspiration when it’s not there is just going to tire you out and make the next session equally unproductive. I believe that Stephen King once likened it to kissing a corpse. But then, he would. Walk away, relax, and best of all…

Watch something. Watch, read, listen—it fills the creative tanks, reminds us why we wanted to write in the first place, and often, it’ll unlock the thing that’s missing. That doesn’t mean you’ll see something and subconsciously steal from it (though it doesn’t 100% NOT mean that), it just taps into the creative place a blocked writer can’t access. Very often I’ll see a movie that’ll completely inform what I’m writing, which will bear no resemblance of any kind to that movie. I’ll just know how I want to feel when I’m writing it. (Episode 10 of season three of Buffy: totes indebted to The Last Temptation of Christ.)

Have a deadline. I would probably never get anything written if it weren’t shooting next week. I’m a terrible procrastinator, which means the adrenaline of last-minute panic is my friend. (It’s all that kept me afloat in school, I’m sad to say. My attention has a disorderly deficit. There was no acronym for that when I was little.) But you can create deadlines of your own. Friends are good for this. Make yourself mutually accountable—you have to deliver such-and-many words by this-or-then time, as do they. You might not always (or ever) hold to these, but they can help you remember that your writing may matter to someone besides yourself.

Have rewards. I’m talking about cookies. Actually, I’m finishing with cookies. What matters more? Earn them, then enjoy them.

OK then. Good luck!

No, wait. Good writing! No—happy writing.

Ack. No! Um…and thus I have argued that the main causes of…blech.

This is Joss, signing…what? No.

Bon appetite! Rosebud! Nobody’s perfect! To infinity, and…I give up. I’m never gonna find the right ending.

I’m gettin’ a cookie.

And that’s just one of the ten writers in this fantastic collection of advice. Go read the rest and be inspired.

While I’m at it, I’ll share another thing that inspired me today. As you may recall, I’m a big fan of Paolo Bacigalupi. He’s one of a very few writers whose work I will read just because he wrote it. I’ve read everything he’s written (to my knowledge), and I’ve never been disappointed. He is, in short, in my personal pantheon of writing gods.

And then I spy his recent posts on Twitter:

@paolobacigalupi: Fucking short story. Fuck fuck fuck. #despair. Fuck.

@paolobacigalupi: It’s entirely possible to make your story worse. This, I know.

@paolobacigalupi: Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck

And then this happened:

Which just proves, once again, that the pros have the same problems the rest of us do. They’re mortal, and if they can do it, we can do it.

So let’s get to writing, then! Er … I mean … COOKIE!

Guilt-Free Creativity

So you may have noticed that this blog about writing hasn’t really been so much about writing lately. It’s become more of a blog about reading, hasn’t it?

Yes, it has.

The problem is, I haven’t been writing anything except book reviews. When I’m not writing, I don’t much feel like writing about writing; I feel like a fraud.

I’m not sure why I haven’t been writing — or, at least, I wasn’t sure until a few minutes ago. I’ve got the idea for a great science fiction space opera trilogy 90% written in my head (well, okay, maybe 50%), but when I sit down to type it up, nothing comes out.

Ditto with a short story that I’ve got the bones for written down, beginning to end, but I can’t flesh it out more than that. Nothing comes.

So what happened a few minutes ago that opened my eyes to my problem? I read an article called “Guilt-Free Creativity: Stop Kicking Yourself & Start Producing.” Particularly, it was this part:

Guilt That You Are Progressing Too Slowly

The Challenge: Once you have the time to focus on your creative pursuits, you may discover that you completely underestimated how long it would take you to make progress. Your grandiose visions of writing the next great American novel deflate to hopes of completing a few short stories. Or your desire to create a website that makes your designer friends drool diminishes to a hope that you’ll launch a site where all the hyperlinks function.

The Solution: Just because you have what you consider loads of time, doesn’t mean that you can get everything done at once. It took Michelangelo four years to paint the Sistine Chapel and some of the world’s greatest buildings took hundreds of years to construct. Instead of getting discouraged, record what actions you do on a daily and weekly basis and celebrate what you did accomplish. Also, try to find ways to get a sense of completion faster, such as publishing an excerpt of your book as an article, exhibiting the first painting in something that will become a series, or giving a presentation on your findings so far.

Is guilt holding you back, or have you overcome it? Tell me how you beat it, because I really need to get writing again.

 

Your Writing Goals May Be Holding You Back

A few days ago, in my blogpost about getting to know your characters, I mentioned the concept of Goal-Motivation-Conflict (GMC). Today, I’d like to share an article not about your characters goals, but about yours as a writer.

We’ve always been told to have goals, right? “Keep your eyes on the prize,” the motivational speakers say. But here’s the thing: a new study shows those very goals may be what keeps us from achieving them.

What the what?

I know it sounds crazy-go-nuts, but the article, How Goals and Good Intentions Can Hold Us Back, makes a pretty convincing argument:

A new study by a pair of researchers at the University of Chicago and the Korea Business School shows that this approach has some benefits. Focusing on goals fires up your intentions to engage in the activities that will help you achieve those goals. But there’s a major downside. Stay focused on your goals and you spoil your experience of the activities you’ll need to pursue. In turn, that makes it far more likely that you’ll drop out early and fail to achieve the very goals that you’re so focused on.

Ayelet Fishbach and Jinhee Choi started out by recruiting over a hundred students at a university gym, just as they were about to start a session. Half were told to describe their goals – “I work out to lose weight,” said one. The other participants were told to think about and describe the workout experience: “I stretch first and then run on the treadmill” was one comment. Both groups of students were told to continue focusing on their goals or the experience, respectively, throughout their workout.

Describing the goals of working out boosted the students’ intentions to exercise. They tended to say that they planned to run on the treadmill for longer than did the students who were focused on the workout experience. But here’s the thing: The students who focused on their goals actually ended up running on the treadmill for less time than the students focused on the experience (34 minutes versus 43 minutes).

Fishbach and Choi think that staying focused on our goals detracts from the inherent pleasures of the activities we need to pursue to achieve those goals. Consistent with this, they found that the students at the gym who stayed focused on their goals tended to say afterwards that the exercise felt more of an effort, as compared with the students who were focused on the experience itself.

The article goes on to offer more evidence, and it’s well worth reading. It also supports all those writers who say that you have to write for the joy of writing, as well as all of those “do what you love and the money will follow” folks.

I’ve always believed that passion shines through the work, no matter if you’re a writer, an artist, or a clockmaker. If you enjoy what you are doing, you’re going to do it better. Likewise, if you’re just doing it for the money, or the fame, or whatever, it’s not going to shine much at all. But I’ve also always believed that it’s important to stay focused on your goals—until today.

(And by the way, that article comes from a great website for creative people called 99u.com, which is sponsored by Behance. Check out some of their other articles, like Is An Inner Argument Holding Back Your Productivity? which dovetails nicely with the article above.)

What do you think? Are goals critical to your success, or do they hold you back?

Writing When You Just Don’t Want To

Image by Paul Lusch

Sometimes we sit down to write and nothing comes, and we tell ourselves we’ve got writer’s block and go off to do something else. I’m having a day like that today, actually. But you know what? It’s not writer’s block, because writer’s block doesn’t exist.

No, really.

Writer’s block is just our brains being lazy. We’re stressed over a million things, or we’re wrung out from a long day at work, or it’s nice outside and we just don’t want to be stuck in front of the keyboard. But we’re not “blocked.”

I’ve got a two quotes on my cork board that I stare at on days like today. The first is from a Quote-A-Day calendar I had years ago, and it’s attributed to “Rudolph” Nureyev. I assume the editor of the calendar meant Rudolf Nureyev, but I cannot find it attributed to him anywhere else. Nevertheless, it’s a good quote:

Nothing good happens unless you work very hard. Nothing happens. Nothing comes to you. You have to make it  happen, even if you have talent.

The other one is longer and comes from Luke Salisbury, back when he wrote for the Boston Globe. Salisbury is a big fan of William Faulkner, and once wrote this about the author:

Nothing stopped Faulkner.

He wrote when he wasn’t famous;

He wrote after winning the Nobel Prize.

He wrote when his books couldn’t make money and when the sale prices of his stories set records.

He wrote when his books were out of print.

He wrote drunk and sober, and sojourns in Hollywood didn’t stop him.

Phenomenal quantities of alcohol, extramarital affairs, an unhappy marriage, or celebrity never got in his way.

He was a writer.

I look at those two quotes and the bully in my brain says, “Yeah, well that ain’t you is it, Chachi.” Some days, I take the bully on and redouble my efforts to write, and other days, I slink away in defeat.

I’m trying to do more of the former and less of the latter.

Either way, though, it’s up to me. I’m not blocked, even on the days I walk away. I’m just lazy.

It’s okay to have a lazy day now and then. When I finish a draft, I usually take a week off before going back to start the rewrite. Partly, it’s a reward for finishing something, but it’s also a way to attack the rewrite with “fresh eyes” and enough distance from the writing of the draft that the seams and rough edges and typos are easier to spot and fix. But even on my lazy days, I’ll try to do something that inspires me or helps my writing in some way. Sometimes I watch TED Talks. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I go do something I’ve never done before. And a lot of the time, I stare off into space and give my mind free reign to gallop in any direction it pleases.

But only for a day.

On the days when I can’t allow myself a lazy day and I still have trouble getting started, I just start writing. I write about my frustrations, my worries, my stress. I write about the story I should be writing, and why I’m having trouble getting started, and describe the story I want to write. Pretty soon, I’m writing. Block, schmlock. It works like a charm, but only if my fingers are punching the keys. I have to be typing (or, less often, hand writing) what’s coming into my head as it’s coming into my head. If I don’t, it’s just thinking; it’s not writing.

The next time you think you have “writer’s block,” just start writing and see what happens. Don’t worry about the story you “should” be writing. Just dump everything in your head on the page. Start telling yourself the story as if you’re telling it to a new friend:

“Well, there’s this guy, this like detective guy, but not really. He’s a former cop, but he quit because of some reason I haven’t figured out yet. And he’s not a P.I., either. He’s — maybe he’s retired or something. Or retired on disability, because he got shot pretty bad and has to wear a colostomy bag now or something. Anyway, he meets this woman…”

And just keep going like that until the story begins to gel.

UPDATE: Five minutes after I posted this, I spotted a link the this article on Forbes on how goofing off can help you be more productive (and beat writer’s block). What’s your secret for beating the block?