Deborah Cooke: Author

I’ve been thinking about Annie’s comment on Monday, and on writing more blog posts about writing. Since I don’t have a guest booked for today, and it is NaNoWriMo, I thought it might be interesting to talk about the great boogeyman that plagues writers. (Or at least gives us nightmares.)

Writers’ block. Writer’s block means simply that the writer can’t write. Fingers on the keyboard accomplishes nothing. The words simply aren’t there. The page – or screen – remains stubbornly blank. This is the complete opposite of NaNoWriMo’s goal of cheerful productivity.

There are, however, several varieties of writer’s block, and we’ll look at them in ascending order of severity today. If I’m missing a variant that haunts you, please add it in the comments – these are all the ones I’ve met over the years. I don’t really want to meet any new kin up close and personal 🙂 but you can tell me about your acquaintances.

1/ Procrastination

This is not real writer’s block, but sometimes we like to pretend it is. (Some of us are drama queens.) Procrastination means that we know what comes next but don’t feel like writing it down. Maybe there’s something good on cable. Maybe we’d rather read. Maybe we want to play on the internet or win a game of solitaire instead. Maybe we don’t want to finish that project because then we’ll have to think about the next one. Sometimes we kid ourselves that we need more thinking time when really, we’re just being lazy.

The test is an easy one. Put your butt in your chair and your fingers on the keyboard. Dare yourself to write for thirty minutes. If you do, you were procrastinating but now it’s solved.

2/ The Wrong Turn at Albuquerque

This happens when you’re ripping along merrily, piling up the pages, often feeling a bit proud of how easily the story is dripping from your fingertips, then BANG. The story stops. There is no more. You don’t know what comes next. There is nothing in your mind to move the story forward.

I call it this because I always think of those Bugs Bunny cartoons when it happens to me – you know the ones when he pops out of his hole in an unlikely location, thinking he’s in Miami Beach, flings out his beach chair, umbrella, etc. leaps out and starts to run to the beach. Except he’s in the middle of a freeway exchange, or on Mars, or on the Klondike, or whatever. And invariably, Bugs returns to his hole, tugs out his map and says “Hmm, I must have taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque.”

For me, this is the most common incident of block and the easiest to fix. I really have taken a wrong turn – often I’ve added a clever little hook at the end of a chapter, just one sentence that sends the book in the wrong direction. That’s why I don’t know what comes next. My first test is to back up the file, then in the copied file, delete the last paragraph that I wrote. I read the scene as it now stands, think about it for a few minutes – long enough to make another pot of tea – and if I still don’t know what happens next, the next paragraph goes into the trash. This process continues (I do get impatient and go for entire scenes after a few smaller snips) and usually in an hour or so, I’m rolling again.

3/ Back to the Drawing Board

This kind of writer’s block happens when you don’t know your story or your characters well enough. Maybe you have a great idea, maybe you have a catchy conflict and a punchy first scene, maybe you even had enough to get a contract, but you don’t have enough to keep writing the book. This one is diagnosed by its timing – it’s a block that occurs very early in the process of writing the book. I usually find the first 100 ms pages flow pretty easily, so if I get stuck before that, I know my synopsis and my characterizations need work. I’m going to flesh all of that out, probably do some more research, maybe even do some worldbuilding, before I can continue.

This isn’t a big deal. It’s work you had to do sooner or later anyway. It’s just disconcerting when everything comes to a full stop.

4/ Life Happens

This more serious brand of writer’s block occurs when there is other junk happening in your life, distracting junk or stressful junk (or both) that keeps your imagination from playing creatively. You could be sick, on a short or long term basis, or providing care for someone else who is sick. You could be grieving a loss. You could be moving or renovating. Life can be stressful and can mess with your creative game – remember Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs? Creative writing is in the top section of the pyramid, which means it’s the first to go when anything else happens in your life.

On the other hand, we wouldn’t have much to write about, if we didn’t participate in the world around us. Sometimes you need to step out of your office and live.

You might be able to manage the other commitments in your life to protect your writing time. You might be able to share responsibilities or delegate some of them. You might just have to shoulder your way through a rough patch. You might be able to move a deadline by a month and give yourself time to breathe. You might need to change your tools – I’ve known writers who had to be on the move so got hand-held tape recorders to talk their books instead of writing them. Play around. See if you can find a solution that lets you write even a little. All progress is good, and if you’re doing any writing at all, there will be a cumulative effect in time.

5/ The Real Thing

For me, real writer’s block is completely debilitating. It means you don’t write at all for long periods of time. This isn’t a healthy state for a writer and it is scary. If it has ever happened to you – and I hope it hasn’t and never does – you know what I mean. I have visited this no-writer’s-land once and I never ever want to go back.

This kind of marrow-deep block is usually a reaction to rejection. It can occur because a book of yours was badly reviewed – or even savagely reviewed. It can happen because your publishing partners lied to you, deceived you or stole from you. It can happen because you have survived – or been trashed by – an unnecessarily deep revision, one that is attempting to change your work into something else. It often happens to unpublished writers as a result of mean critiques, cruel critiquing sessions or bad critique partners. This state is so frustrating that it can make writers give up on writing altogether. If you are a writer, then writing is what you need to do, which means you need to manage (and ideally avoid) this kind of writer’s block.

The best tool for defeating the real thing, in my experience, is The Artist’s Way program by Julia Cameron. It can help you find your way back to your well of creativity and get you writing again. It takes time, but when you’re talking about healing your soul and getting your mojo back, twelve weeks isn’t really that long.

Maybe I structured this post the wrong way around. It’s such a drag to end with the worst case scenario, even with a solution! So, tell me about your experiences with writer’s block. Can you identify what causes it? If you have different examples than I’ve listed, please share them. And what are your solutions? How do you get back to work, back to being a healthy happy productive writer?