Writer’s Block: Real or Myth?

Writer's Block: Segement of Berlin Wall at the Newseum in D.C. — Segement of Berlin Wall at the Newseum in D.C.

This week my accountability group is blogging about writer’s block and how we deal with it. Last week’s post on what has writing taught us and what we have learned over the years is also part of our How I Write series.

“Is writer’s block real or a myth and how do you deal with it?”

I believe writer’s block is a real phenomenon. Ok, probably not as literal as the wall in the picture above, but it can feel that way some days.

However, I don’t think writer’s block is necessarily a bad thing that you must sit and bang your head against. It’s merely a signal. Your muse, or your well of creativity, hasn’t abandoned you, it’s just undernourished. Ok, so if you don’t subscribe to the whole muse thing, think of it this way…

Your subconscious and your conscious mind are in total agreement here. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. And until you step back, stop banging your head against the problem, nothing’s going to be resolved in a pretty fashion that you’re going to be happy with in the long run.

So, what can we do once we’ve recognized this signal?

Read: What should you read? ANYthing and EVERYthing that interests you. Read for fun. Read to soak up the skills of the author. Read aloud if you want. Just luxuriate in the words. Let them wash over you. Even reading something that sucks can inspire you to do better. Reading up on the craft of writing helps me think about how I’m putting the words together and gives new ideas to try.
Relax: Take some time for yourself. Pamper yourself. Listen to some music. Take a nap. Reconnect with friends.
Play: Do something you enjoy, just for yourself and for the heck of it. Get down on the floor and play with the kids (borrow someone else’s if you need to and they’ll thank you!) Spend some time pursuing a different hobby.
Exist: This one is harder to explain. It’s similar to meditation, in that your focus is on something repetitive and preferably wordless. Exercise, playing an instrument, knitting, doing the dishes, gardening, walking, showering or soaking in the tub can all fit the bill. Be yourself as much as you can be, and step beyond that. Sounds corny, but works for many and gets the words flowing.

The main thing that all those things have in common is they are ways to refill your creative well and give your subconscious time to work through the question of “What next?”. Writing or any other creative endeavor can be a drain on us. We really need to take time to find balance (one of the things my accountability group focuses on) to give us the time to step back and plan (even if only subconsciously) instead of always running full tilt at the keyboard.

I find I work best when I can routinely cycle between cramming stuff into my brain and then later dumping stuff back out on the page. Others may not find that works for them, or they need a much shorter and less distinctive cycle to feed their muses.

Another thing you can try is a little different in that it’s not a refilling, but more of a rebooting or flushing action.

Write: You can use a journal to dump out all the crap your subconscious is wrestling with and save it for later. Experiment with a new technique. Something new. Something mundane. Writing exercises or writing prompts may help spark your creativity too.

Your Turn: Share how you maintain balance and refill your creative well in the comments below.

And if you’d like to read about what the rest of my group thinks about writer’s block and how they deal with it, you can find their blogs here:

* Alexia Reed * Angeleque Ford * Danie Ford *
* Emma G. Delaney * Kimberly Farris *

Why keep a journal?

Diary, journal, memoir, chronicle, first hand account. Why on earth would anyone bother with such a trivial pursuit as to list what one had for breakfast, what the weather was like, or how much it costs to purchase necessary groceries for the week?

Who cares about this kind of detail when we’re all living it right now anyway?

As part of my writing journey, I began keeping a journal. There are days when I shudder to think of what someone in the future would find within those pages, but they’d have to be capable of reading what will likely become dead media sooner rather than later because they’re not hand written. I kept them on my hard-drive.

So much history gets lost because it’s never written down and even then, it seems like it’s only the grocery lists, cargo manifests and the boring minutiae that survive through the ages. To find out what life was like in another time, you have to go to more amateur sources and rely upon diaries written at the time.

In surfing one day, I found a blog dedicated to reproducing, in real time, the Diary of Samuel Pepys (rhymes with “peeps” – silly Brits and their odd spellings/pronunciations). The diary begins in January of 1660 and has been accumulating once more since 2003.

His diaries are considered the most famous first-hand account of life in mid-seventeenth century. Written in shorthand, his journals provide us with a detailed account of the life of a young man engaged in important public service. Pepys was a high-level bureaucrat in the English government who witnessed major changes in government, a devastating outbreak of the plague, the Great Fire, and a war with Holland.

It’s an interesting read, especially to see how our use of the English language has changed in the last 350 years, but I find I can’t read much at a time. However, once you begin looking at the names and events mentioned, Samuel Pepys certainly lived in interesting times and rubbed shoulders with very influential men.

Do I think my own journal entries will ever be of any interest to others? Highly doubtful, as if whining about how I can’t stay focused, the terrors of dealing with tween angst, or rambling on about how I think a story should or shouldn’t be working and what I thought or some other published writer’s work waxing philosophical about the same types of questions would be of use to anyone else.

I guess the real question is, did Samuel Pepys realize what he was writing at the time?

Say Anything

Don’t worry, I’m not going to wax nostalgic about an 80s movie here. But the title was fitting for how I’ve been thinking about this blog lately…

It doesn’t matter what I say in this post, it’s more a matter of a need to “say anything” at all. I just need to post something, and then do it again in a couple of days. Build and sustain momentum, but the longer I leave it, the harder that gets. Thanks to those of you who commented or have pestered me about why I haven’t been posting. I’ve been feeling the same way about my journal entries lately too. The first couple days I started writing stuff down for 20 minutes were painful. Not as painful as the 10 minutes I spent walking on Monday, but mentally painful. My brain didn’t want to focus or work the way I needed it to, but with practice, it gets easier each day. I just remind myself it doesn’t matter what I type, I just have to type something.

In the movie, Lloyd Dobler asks Constance, “Why can’t you be in a good mood? How hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and be in a good mood once in a while?” I wish I knew. November and December seem to be rough months for me. Not just this year, but to the point I wonder if there’s something about the shortening days that wears me down so much. I know it’s not just holiday stress, but it’s very hard for me to just wake up and decide to be in a good mood. Maybe I should have been born as an animal that hibernates — a bear or a squirrel.

In order to get back into routines that work for me instead of against me, I’m participating in the Accountability Corner with Bria and some other Divas on a separate blog. We’ve set up goals for the coming year and are cheering each other on and holding each other accountable. Like routines, the goals have to work for you too. I think I have better goals than last year’s, but I’m still worried about how measurable and specific they are and if they’ll get me moving in the direction I want.

I also joined GoodReads last year, and I managed to track about 75 books I read last year with it. I’m already tagging books I read this year as well. The next step is to get comments on them written down so I can go back and remember what I liked or disliked about certain books. Of course, getting our entire library up there would be a cool thing, too.

Now that I’ve started this, I’m getting ideas for things to write about, but I think I’ll save them for Saturday.

Wishing everyone the best in 2009!

Onions & Ogres

Yup. Layers. Changing your way of thinking and looking at the world isn’t easy and it doesn’t shift overnight. Repeatedly banging your head against the same walls can help. Wait, I mean repeatedly exposing yourself to the same ideas in different venues, formats and states of mind. I decided to subject you to some snippets from my journal this week. The self-doubt isn’t as high today, honest.

Layers, must add more layers.

I need to think in layers and realize they’re a good and natural process. Nothing is wrong with getting the action down on the page and going back to add in what they’re thinking or experiencing. I do this with dialogue all the time. I need to expand the way I think to include other layers. An onion, or even an ogre, doesn’t have one or two layers. I need to dig deeper and add more little touches everywhere.

I don’t have a slick, clean, sparse voice like Janet Evanovich or Robert Parker. I can live with this. However, I need to be able to take my bland and boring basic sentences without any punch to them and ratchet them up to the next level.

Maybe I possess no real talent for this, or else I’m just doubting myself and questioning the effort to get through this phase. Perhaps I’m biased because I’ve seen DH and others make the art look so effortless. Painters don’t sit down and produce masterpieces. Layers and layers of paint are applied to reach the final image. Sculptors also work with layers. The armature is their rough draft. The form has to be built upon to reach the final stages.

Writing is no different. I need to get past this gestural phrase. Because honestly, that’s all it is. I’m making rough sketches toward what I want the final story to become. Some of my strokes are more confident and better delineate what I’m going for, but they’re still only rough guidelines of where I need to apply more effort later.

I think this is what’s most frustrating. I like seeing things done. Either that or I like to fiddle and play with them forever. However, none of my fiddling has amounted to a significant change. Nothing seems to change the existing functionality of previous versions.

I could be just fooling myself into thinking I can do this. Then again, I should question whether I do give my all or if I coast along, drifting and not pushing myself. That’s always a possibility. I’m wishy-washy on what my actual goals are and why I want to do this. I don’t have the drive to publish I see in other Divas. I don’t know if that’s a fear of success or laziness and lack of focus and ambition.

I don’t like to think I have no drive, no passion, no desire to make something of myself. I hate how I don’t mind shuffling along and ignoring how the world passes me by some days. I feel like I should do something, be someone, but most days, I’m not sure how to do that.

I’ve always been “adequate enough” at everything I attempt. I’d say the text game I worked on for a decade was probably one of the few places where I strove to do things better all the time. I don’t know if others would agree, because I did a hell of a lot of coasting too, but for a while, I was dedicated to bringing a deeper and better experience to the players in the areas I built and maintained.

I suspect that’s part of my problem with writing. I get the equivalent of the rooms and mobs done and think I have accomplished something. Either no ACTS exist to animate them or if there are, they’re sketchy and inconsistent. All of Janet Evanovich’s characters possess the equivalent of full libraries of ACTS behind them. Her settings are rich with revisited details. They’re familiar (some even say repetitive), but also resonant.

It’s likely I’m too close to what I’ve written still, but damn, I have trouble seeing where and how to improve what’s already on the page. I find it very difficult if the improvements require cutting something out. To my mind, that aspect is the most foreign.

Journal Query

Pen on journal page In my journal entry on Friday, I wrote a big whine about how my progress with The Flower Queen’s Daughter was going. It isn’t really relevant except I was asked in chat what I wrote about in my journal. I replied that I usually use it for ranting, whining, and thinking out loud about what I’m working on, how my process is working or not and ways I can improve as a writer.

Just the question sparked a tangent in the second part of the entry where I was still thinking about how I was approaching this story and writing in general. The following is excerpted from that entry with minimal editing.

It’s funny when people ask me what I write about in my journal and I come out with one of my “big think day topics” or even just say that I’m thinking out loud about my story and what’s working and what isn’t and I’m surprised by how impressed they sound. Don’t other writers think about what they’re doing? Maybe they don’t or maybe it’s just that they don’t write their thoughts down. I certainly didn’t do either when I tried this back in college. I just sat down and started writing words down. I didn’t think about things like conflict, or scenes or anything like that or even plot.

I know my writing has improved since then, but I often find myself paralyzed by insecurity and indecision. I need to push through that and not worry so much about getting things wrong, I just need to write something down. It’s much easier to fix something you can see, than something that’s just wisping around in your head.

Writing doesn’t exist until you put it on the page. This is not performance art we’re talking about where it’s only experienced once in the moment. This also isn’t sculpture in stone. This is malleable and evolving art form. Nothing’s written in stone until it’s in print and even then, small changes can be made in subsequent editions.

In any case, I need to stop worrying and just write. It really doesn’t matter if it sucks. It’s all a learning process. Everything can be improved until it’s released out into the world. I won’t be judged on the early drafts. DH will only send me back to rewrite it if it sucks, but he won’t think less of me because of it. I just need to keep on rollin’.

So, which side of the line do you fall? Do you feel you over-analyze everything or do you just write as it all comes to you never looking back? Or have you managed to find a happy medium?

Two Months & Counting

Saving my journal entry this morning, I realized this week marked two solid months. I’ve only missed 4 days since the end of June.

This is impressive for me. Usually, I have the attention span of a gnat and projects are fun to start, but never seem to be finished.

My early journal entries are shaky and uncertain. Some days, I forced myself to put down any thought that popped into my head. What I wrote didn’t matter, as long as I was wrote. Now, 1,000 words in a half hour is a comfortable pace. The words flow best when I rant, sure, but I can tell I’ve been flexing my writing muscles.

Every writing book I’ve read emphasizes the permission a writer needs to grant themselves to write a really crappy first draft. I’ve certainly excelled at upholding that tradition this summer!

As Fall begins (at least where actual seasons happen), I find myself wanting to push harder. Two months of writing a thousand or so words in a journal is nothing in any grand scheme, but for me it is significant progress.

I have a finished first draft of a 6k-word short story and 25k words on a single novel manuscript (three times my previous efforts). However, I now facing a new challenge: pulling the raw ideas together to create consistent, compelling and interesting stories.

Occasionally, I’m going to hit brick walls like I did last week. I can chalk it up to nerves and lack of self-confidence, but I’m also determined to finish this novel.

I’d be interested to hear how others push themselves and how they have set goals for themselves.