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 *

Inspiration!

Last week, we shared our Writing Routines. This week for our “How I Write” series, my accountability group is sharing what inspires us. What inspires us? What do we turn to for inspiration when we’re having trouble starting a project? What keeps us going? How do we make it through to the end of a project?

Single bloom among several spent ones.
Why does one idea survive when others wither?

Serious questions for such an important topic. However, serious is the one thing I usually can’t be if I’m staring down a new project.

I need to feel like I’m having fun. To feel like I’m in love with the project. Surfing through stock photos or even photos of celebs is usually good for getting in some eye candy and finding possible hero material. Just taking a pad of paper and sitting outside or flopping on my bed, or anywhere really as long as it’s a different location helps. It can’t feel like W.O.R.K.

Music also helps. My husband and I have a huge music collection. And it’s quite eclectic. I’ve gotten story ideas from some of the song lyrics and some of the titles. How odd is that when I can’t write with music with lyrics playing? Of course, going to a live show also always helps refill the creativity well.

You wouldn’t think taking time away from creative work to slog through text books on the craft of writing would help fuel my creative side, but it works with my cyclic routine. I stuff my brain full of enough theory and other people’s prose and eventually, I just need to sit down and work on something of my own. With writing craft, it means I get to play with a new idea or technique. With reading other fiction, I don’t always stick to the genre I write, Regency-set Historical Romances, but venture out into science-fiction, fantasy, young adult, paranormal or contemporary romance. I’ve also been known to sit and read a variety of the non-fiction books that DH leaves laying around. They’re always good for some pop-psy or pop-sci tidbits I wouldn’t have searched out on my own.

As far as inspiring me to sit down and put words on the page. That first day is the hardest. The second day is close behind. I have to have a roadmap, some kind of outline. The more I know about a story beforehand, the easier it is for me to tease out the smaller details along the way and let my characters surprise me. The best methods I’ve found to get BICHOK — butt in chair, hands on keyboard — is to use a timer and a chat room. I’ve always done better knowing someone else is working beside me, even if they’re working on something different.

I blame my DH for that. Back in college, I had to finish my thesis. He said, “If I have to work, so do you.” Yeah, I’m a crack procrastinator from way back. This work ethic carried through to when we worked at the same company making computer games. It drove me nuts when I got my own office and I couldn’t tell if anyone else was working without having to get up and go see. In the same office, he could be surfing the web, but it felt like he was focused, so I felt the need to focus on my own work. This is why the internet has been my link to sanity and adult conversation as well as a motivating force during my years as a stay at home mom and to get me through two projects start to finish.

Of course, there are the projects started and never finished. My mom today told me how proud she was that I finished a novel and submitted it into to an agent. Yes, my mom knows me from way back too. She’s seen WAY too many creative projects started and never finished. I think the difference with these two novels is that I love the ideas behind them, the characters in them and the people I’ve met along the journey since I introduced these characters to each other.

Writing may be a solitary occupation, but that doesn’t mean we ever have to be alone while we’re working!

To see what inspires a few of my fellow writers, visit their websites, below:

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

Getting Down to Business

Last week, we shared our Writing Caves. This week for our “How I Write” series, we chose to focus on our writing process. Not the big overall picture, that could be a book in itself, right? But rather the mechanics of sitting down to write and what rituals or routines we have to prepare ourselves and get into the zone.

What I usually have open when I'm writing.
The Usual Suspects

The first thing I have to do is clear my email. This usually involves nearly wearing out my delete key, but often there’s some keepers. Next, I open up iTunes and if I’m going to add some serious word count or do a journal entry, I pull up my playlist for either Peter Gabriel’s Passion or the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I can’t do new words with lyrics. I like Passion because it’s an hour long and it builds in tempo and intensity the entire time. That’s been my go to  album for focus since college.

Once I’m settled in my chair with a bottle of water, I open up Excel for my spreadsheets and Word for the actual manuscript. Once I’m ready to dig in, I open up online-stopwatch, a great little flash timer that Bria Quinlan turned me on to. I think I wore out 2 or 3 regular kitchen timers by that point. It’s great! It only startles me if I’m using headphones to listen to music and concentrate when I’d take my laptop to work at the martial arts studio. So, 20 minutes on the virtual clock and I’m ready to go.

That’s it in a nutshell. Everything’s meant to focus me inward instead of looking around at all the shiny. I can’t unplug my phone in case one of the kids needs me from school and I’ve NEVER been someone who can listen to a ringing phone. Yes, we have an answering machine. Yes, I even have caller-id so I could screen my calls. But most of the time it’s more distracting to have it ring and listen to the message than to just answer it.

If I’m doing edits on a story, I usually settle into the recliner with printed pages (for my own stuff) or my laptop (for my CP’s stuff) with a bottle or two of water. Likewise, if I’m doing pre-writing work, I’ll take a pencil and note paper and start scribbling there.

As far as a schedule or when I do my best work… I usually work in the mornings to get things done and out of the way. This also happens to coincide when kids and husbands sleep in on weekends and vacations. That way they don’t have to feel like they’re interrupting me and I don’t get frustrated with interruptions. It also means I can spend the rest of the day with them writing-guilt free. When I first started writing again in 2007, I was writing a lot in the evenings and at night. Homework has gotten harder to help with and everyone needs to go to bed earlier these days, so that hasn’t happened in a while.

I’m in the process of settling back into the “kids are in school routine” and need to look at my writing schedule and make it more efficient. Learning to juggle all the moving parts of this endeavor is quite a challenge, but it’s keeping me out of trouble for now.

What routines and rituals do you rely on? Can you settle in to focus even if you don’t/can’t go through the motions of getting down to business?

To see how a few of my friends write, you can visit their websites, below:

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

How to Spread Your Wings

Spread Your Wings: Western Swallowtail ButterflyIf someone had asked me how to spread your wings a couple years ago, I would have had no idea how to answer them. One of the most painful things to do as a writer, or maybe it’s just me as an introvert, is to move out of an established comfort zone. This year has been a series of those kinds of steps for me. I joined RWA, I’ve entered contests, placed and won bids on critiques or just asked different people for their thoughts on my writing. I have several other steps planned for the rest of the year, but I know it’s not going to get any easier.

So how have I managed to force myself out of my cocoon and out of my comfort zone?

1) Setting small yet attainable goals. Breaking bigger goals down into smaller ones help make it not feel so overwhelming. Telling yourself you only have to do one small thing deflates the importance and takes some of the scary out of the task.

2) Sneaking up on those goals. Baby steps help here too. In preparation for sending off a submission packet to an agent, I’ve done a lot of similar yet different things this year. In bidding on critique donations, I ended up sending 3 chapters to a published author. Yeah, that was harder than sending it to someone I know online. However, I know that when I go to hit send on a submission, it’ll be easier for the practice.

3) Realizing no one else can do these things for me. If I want to be a published author, these goals are on that path and I’ll have to tackle them at some point. Each step takes me closer to that goal and each step so far has gotten easier. Maybe it’s just looking back that makes the previous steps look so much smaller, like when you stand at the top of the stairs cut into a mountainside and look down at where you started climbing.

What kinds of things do you find yourself doing to push yourself and spread your wings?

Drafting or Drifting?

Picture of trees and clouds, nothing exciting.In my last post, I talked about how my writing style seems to be rather Cyclic in Nature, either full-on or drifting between bouts of inspiration. The good news is that I’ve finished a very rough draft of Beneath His Touch and I’m looking ahead to 2011 and starting to build my goals list.

While it’s tempting to be all cloud-like during this hectic time of the year, I know I need to take advantage of this “down” time and stuff my head full once more in order to build up for the next round. Looking at what I want to accomplish next year, I have one manuscript to edit and revise, one to do some reworking on, and one that I want to do as a free serial read here as part of Excerpt Mondays.

Just putting that much down in black and white makes it intimidating and I feel like the clock is already ticking. Maybe that’s just the one for Christmas shopping! Eep. I’m sure you’ve have plenty yet to do in 2010 as well, so I’ll just wish you and yours a fantastic holiday season and that 2011 is all you want it to be in case we miss each other in all the holiday cheer.

(And no, this isn’t my last planned post for the year! I’m trying to ease back into regular postings so I don’t scare myself away again.)

Ruts Suck

Photo of early 1990s car stuck in a rut. I think my parents messed up when I was born. My middle name should have been ‘procrastination’ instead of what they wrote down on the form at the hospital.

Unfortunately, even knowing that the longer something is put off the harder it becomes to start doesn’t seem to prevent me from falling into those same ruts of routine. Thanks to Toni Sue for prompting me to look at this blog and question why I haven’t been giving it any attention for so long.

Have I run out of things to say? Nope. I just haven’t had the energy to pry them out of my head and plop them down on the page. Having my son out of school this year for 5 months really took its toll on me. It’s not a good excuse, and I wasn’t really looking for an excuse, but I can pinpoint when he started the independent study program as the point where my free time vanished.

Why I say I wasn’t looking for an excuse and that’s not a good one is that he went back to the traditional campus at the end of March. *flips through her calendar* Uh.. yeah… So… what have I been doing the past two months? A heckuva lot of nothing. Nothing meaningful anyway.

I’ve been stuck in a very passive rut. Barely reactive, forget proactive. What really sucks is that it’s not just writing that’s suffered, but pretty much everything. I’ve tried to keep up with a bare minimum of requirements, but honestly, there’s not much spark in anything right now.

Back at the beginning of May, I started working through The Weekend Novelist by Robert J. Ray and Bret Norris. This has been helpful in sneaking back up on writing, but it’s still feeling a bit more like a chore than fun. I suspect I may need to cut out all my passive entertainment during the day and just play around with my characters again for a while. Anything to get the wheels back on track and find a routine that works for me.

Am I insane for thinking this can work just as I switch gears from school year to summer vacation mode? We’ll see. Something’s gotta give.

Holiday Madness

Happy Holidays!You may remember a post I did last March titled A Case of the Megrims, where I wished I was doing research for either a story or my Regency Resource pages, but instead I detailed the problems our son was having with a sinus infection.

Unfortunately, that was just the beginning. The CT scan the day after that post showed positive for a sphenoid sinus infection. An MRI in May still showed signs. After a prednisone taper, he had a moon-face and far too much extra weight compared to pictures taken a year previously. A trip to the allergist revealed mold and dust mite allergies resulting in two daily prescriptions. But finally, he was feeling better. We had a good 4-5 weeks in May and the first bit of June. Then he caught a type-A flu just in time to miss his 5th grade promotion ceremony and promptly shared it with me. This was likely swine flu, but we both recovered.

The boy spent the summer and beginning of the school year in and out of headaches, usually triggered by the heat. We won’t talk about the utter failure of Boy Scout camp where the heat reached 112˚F and we ended up with a single merit badge in art for $300. So, except for the heat, we thought we’d start 6th grade with this behind us except for a few bad days scattered early on in the year.

Then came the end of October with the Santa Ana winds. No local wildfires this year, just lots of dust and dry heat. The first week of November, I could sense something was different. The raccoon eyes were back and his personality was fading fast. I took him to the pediatrician and told him it was just like before. Double dose/double round of antibiotics later, and no improvements just a climbing absence toll.

Finally, at the end of November we were scheduled for another CT Scan. Yup, same thing. So we next scheduled an ENT visit. She didn’t think the infection would cause headaches, but based on the 3 scans, she recommended surgery, which we assumed was next and we really didn’t want another round of prednisone. So, he’s been out of school about 6 weeks. Guess how long it is until his surgery is scheduled. Another 6 weeks.

We have a meeting next week with the school nurse, counselor and maybe some teachers to see what we can do to catch up on this quarter that he’s missed. The problem I see, is even with what little he’s managed to finish, I’m not sure he’s going to retain any of it. Especially since, we have no interim relief.

We also have an appointment with a neurologist since he seems to get classic migraines with this non-classic location. However, the pain-relief meds he gave him, aren’t doing jack-squat for him. Progress feels very slow and it’s very stressful to watch the life sucked out of my kid like this.

So… what’s all this mean for me as a writer? I may get some sort of story fodder from it, but mostly I have a lot of distraction on my hands. This at the same time I really, really want to finish this manuscript. Oh.. and toss in the usual holiday madness of decorating, baking, shopping, and parties. Yeah… progress on the manuscript is slow.

I started tracking my wordcount back mid-October. I’ve managed to add an additional 25k to the novel, not a great daily or weekly average, but it is forward progress. Will I make 90k by New Year’s Eve? Doubtful. Will I finish the story as I have it laid out? Possibly. Right now, I’d need 1800 words a day to make 90k by then. However, my story looks like it’ll run about 350 pages, and I’ve been averaging 225 words/page. So that sounds like 78,500 words total. Not bad for a first draft with lots of dialogue runs and lots of places that need some more emotional punch.

Kinda like why I always wondered why Chris Baty picked November for NaNoWriMo, I’m kind of wondering why I stacked the deck against myself here. But you know what? I don’t think it matters when you choose to work, there’s always going to be some external force that will be much easier to blame for your procrastination. Just write it.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

67 Days

calendarI decided I’m not going to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I’m taking a slower approach and hoping to complete the first full draft of my Regency, Beneath His Touch, by December 31st. This gives me 67 days to write another 56k words to end up with 90k total. When I’ve been able to sit down and focus, I’ve been able to write a bit over 1k words a day. This is lower than the 1667 words a day for NaNoWriMo. To finish this book in November, it would take around 1900 words a day, something I’m not willing to commit to right now.

Unfortunately, I’m not a crazy college student with all the free time in the world on my hands. I have two middle schoolers who are in need of a bit more direction and support to make it through this next quarter while trying to keep up with martial arts and scouts as well. Not to mention all the normal holiday fanfare in the next two months that will fall on my shoulders.

But that’s what the group, Accountability Corner, I belong to is all about: balancing life with writing. Lately, we’ve been trying to think of our writing as starting a small business and what all needs to be done to make it successful. I still feel like I’m very much in the R&D and early product development stages. I know what I want, but I’m not quite sure the prototypes are living up to my expectations. It was surprising to see how many activities we could tie to the ones listed for starting a small business and even more so, how many of them we were already pursuing. Some of us more than others, but we were all headed in the right direction.

Speaking of R&D, I’ve been doing a lot of research lately. Not necessarily Regency specific research, although a lot of people have been visiting my Regency Resource pages, but I’ve been reading voraciously this year. I could only recall about 79 books that I’d read last year, but this year I decided to keep track with GoodReads and set up a shelf for books I read in 2009. I’m surprised that I’ve read 105 books so far and I have another two in progress as well. I tend to keep one book in the car to read while I pick up the kids and I forget to bring it in, so I pick up and start another one in the house. I’m curious to see how far I’ll get on that count in the next 67 days as well.

So, what are YOU going to do in the next 67 days?

Warrior Writer Recap

So, the Warrior Writer Workshop. I was scared it was going to be too similar to Todd A. Stone’s Novelist’s Boot Camp, but reading the book, Who Dares Wins, I realized the Blood Lessons and the Circle of Success rang much truer and allowed me to take those ideas beyond the writing and see the applicability to other parts of my life. This is for those who want to be the elite, not just the rank and file. One is filled with only tactical approaches, Warrior Writer is a strategic approach that helps you build for overall success.

Continue reading “Warrior Writer Recap”

Focus Point

out of focusIn photography terms, a focus point refers to the small brackets, lines or circle in the middle of an autofocus point-and-shoot camera’s viewfinder that indicates where the camera is pointing. In broader terms, I like to think of it as what I’m currently putting my energy toward: be it a project, a routine to reinforce or an outlook to cultivate.

Lately, my focus point has been my son and his headache(s). We’re still dealing with this on a daily basis. He has made it to school this week for the state standardized testing, but today was a real fight to get him there. “Mom, this is my second worst headache. EVER!” *sigh* He was feeling a bit better over the weekend and the past two days after school he’s been miserable. He complained yesterday that he spent an hour and a half in the health office and even got sick, but the health tech wouldn’t call home because he’d missed so much school already. Hopefully, she’ll call today if he feels as bad as he says he does.

So what’s this have to do with writing? I have no focus lately. I’m still only about 15 pages into this book and I’m fighting for ever word. I don’t think I can say I’m actually experiencing writer’s block in the traditional sense of the phrase because to me that implies that you’re putting in serious effort in trying to get something onto the page. It feels more that I don’t know where I’m trying to go with the story so, I’m muddling my way through a heavy fog.

One of the things, I’d wanted to work on in my mentor program was learning to build a road map I can trust. I feel like I’m still a ways from that point. It feels like there are too many unanswered questions in the “yes, but HOW do I show this happening” part of my “working outline”. I like my characters to surprise me, but I find I still need a very detailed roadmap in order to get anywhere.

I know I have focus issues on the best of days. Having so many less than ideal days in a row is frustrating to say the least. Maybe I just have the attention span of a fruit fly, but there’s got to be a better way to work with it instead of continually against it. I need to find a way to deal with constant interruptions to keep track of where my thoughts had been and where they should be going.

I think this is why the snowflake method was so appealing. The idea is to constantly build on what you’ve already got. With Revealed, that approach seemed to work rather well. I suspect the trick is making sure all of the basic elements are present from the beginning.

Anyway, off to write something down…