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HOW TO CURE A CASE OF WRITER’S BLOCK
Feeling stuck in your manuscript, craft, or career? Here are 15 of the most common problems that can stall a writer’s progress – plus key strategies for overcoming each one.
BY DANA SHAVINRecently, my local writer’s guild asked to feature me in their monthly newsletter. A glutton for exposure, I said yes. I then received a list of 10 questions, two of which stood out. One was “When did you first consider yourself to be a writer?” The other was “What is your biggest time waster?” In thinking about these two questions, I realized I could answer one with the other:
I knew I was a writer when I found myself sitting at my desk day after day with my forehead in my hands, staring at my lap and thinking about how I couldn’t write.
My biggest time waster? My own brain, which distracts me from my writing with all sorts of negative messages, impulsive meanderings, and good old-fashioned fear. In his speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College in 2005, the late David Foster Wallace said, “‘Learning how to think’ really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to, and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally confused.”
In other words, we are the architects of our own thoughts, and the sooner we come to realize this, the sooner, and more effectively, we can exercise control over how we use them.
Are we going to be a slave to their capricious wanderings and pessimistic prattle, letting them lead us willy-nilly all over the landscape of our not-writing? Or will we take the helm and, by exercising the right balance of freedom and control, allow our writing the space to flourish? As a writer, a life coach, and a therapist, I’ve given a lot of thought to the things that keep me – and many of my writer friends – stuck in our work, unable to move forward or think creatively about what needs to come next in our projects. What follows are some straightforward, creative, and compassionate ways to think about what’s keeping you stuck – and to get you going again.
1 PROBLEM:You have ‘too few’ ideas. You don’t know what your next project is, or your next chapter, or your character’s next move. You are stewing in a pot of “I don’t know,” going in circles trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. You feel like you’ll never have another good idea as long as you live.
WHAT TO DO: Indecision is fear in disguise. This is true not just in writing. Sometimes what feels like poverty of thought is actually FOMO (fear of missing out). You don’t want to work on just anything, after all – you want to work on something deeply meaningful and profoundly resonant. If you can’t figure out what that is, you think: Why begin at all? And so, you remain shut down, seemingly at a loss for ideas.
+ Accept that you can’t force profundity. In its (temporary) absence, reclaim your sense of play. At the top of a piece of paper, write “10 Terrible Ideas” (for my story, for my character, for my essay, etc.), and see what comes up. Then write “10 Even Worse Ideas” and see where that goes. Write fast without editing. Marvel at how you just came up with 20 ideas. Do any of them hold a kernel of promise? Do this several times and see where it takes you.
+ Promise to give yourself time to worry at the end of your writing day. When it’s time, list everything you can think of that is worrying you. Often when we name our fears, it helps to tame them.
+ Many people find that by writing in genres they wouldn’t ordinarily write in, it frees them up to think about and see their work differently. Do a short experiment and see where it takes you.
+ Begin anywhere. Success builds on itself. Even if you don’t ultimately stay with what you’ve started, starting creates momentum.
2 PROBLEM: You have too many ideas. You have so many ideas for your writing, you don’t know where to begin…so you begin nowhere. You don’t know how to bring forward the best ideas and leave the others on a back burner for later. Again, FOMO is your enemy here, the fear that you’ll choose the wrong project instead of the very idea that will take your writing to the next level.
WHAT TO DO: Master your own focus. When patients come into an emergency room, they are triaged: the most seriously ill get attention first, the least serious last. As the midwife of your work, you must learn to do this as well, allowing your most urgent work to get the attention it needs.
+ Write out all of your ideas that are truly in contention. Then tune into your heart and your gut – your reservoirs of truth – and ask: Which ideas can wait without causing me pain or losing their intensity? Which feel most urgent? Which projects tap most deeply into my core values – those ideas and missions that most define who I am and what I stand for?
+ If you had to choose just two of your ideas or projects, which two would you choose? Can you work on them simultaneously? How? 3 PROBLEM: You have too many competing desires or responsibilities. There is so much you want to do with your writing, but you have family responsibilities, finite time, or limited resources. You also want to travel, paint, or go to grad school for your MBA. Can you have it all? WHAT TO DO: We are all guilty of black-and-white thinking, which is restrictive and narrow and leads us to believe our options are finite. There may be things you simply cannot put on a back burner while you pursue your writing or other goals. That said, nobody made a rule that you can’t carve out time to pursue your own interests. Are your responsibilities truly getting in the way, or are they a convenient distraction? Is the problem that you have too much to take care of or that you take on roles that keep you from writing? It’s easy to feel everything else is more important than putting words on a page. But it’s not true.
+ If family or work duties are interfering, can you swap time with a
co-worker or spouse, or get creative with your hours? When my husband was transitioning from full-time mental health work to opening a bookstore, he arranged to work longer hours but fewer days, then used the extra day to pursue his business goals. When I was transitioning from full-time mental health work to becoming a potter, I found a flexible job doing contract psychological testing and used my off hours to take pottery classes. How can you get creative with your time and responsibilities? What can you give up in order to clear space for yourself? Who do you need to get permission from?
+ Often, we decide the important things we want to do cancel out the other important things we want to do, but sometimes that isn’t true – and by thinking creatively about our options, we see paths we didn’t see before. “What’s possible?” is one of my favorite life-coaching questions. It’s meant to spur people to dig deep, reach high. Notice we don’t ask, “Is anything possible?” The phrasing of the first question assumes that possibilities are out there and that our job is to expand our thinking to find them. For example, if you want to write and travel, can you look for travel writing opportunities? Or find ways to write from the road? Can you divide your time between activities – writing on weeknights, road-tripping on weekends?
+ You don’t have to solve for everything at once. Keep pulling back the blinds, looking forward, trying new tactics to get you where you want to go. Evolution is a process, not a leap.
+ We do not have to be monogamous to our art form. Most people pursuing their art have competing duties and passions. It’s up to us to figure out how to make things work. + Another great life coaching question is, “What if it were easy?” We often assume what we want to do is going to be hard, or too hard, or even harder than we thought it would be. But guess what: it might be easier than you think. Stay open to the possibility of something being easy, rather than going immediately to “gloom and doom.” Also, when we are working toward our goals, the hard edge of difficulty is softened by enthusiasm and the knowledge that we have gotten into the ring at last.
4 PROBLEM: You have ideas that you do not know how to bring to light. You want to write a book or a short story or get published, but you have no idea how to begin.
WHAT TO DO: Spend less time saying “I don’t know how” to the wrong people (i.e., those who can’t help you) and start saying it to the right people.
+ Hire a mentor or coach. I can’t stress enough the impact one-on-one writing help can have. I’ve had lots of mentors, some better than others, but they all moved me forward in some way.
+ Find other people doing what you want to do and ask them how they got there. Don’t be afraid they’ll be annoyed – most people love to help, as long as you don’t make a pest of yourself.
+ Read the memoirs of those who did or are doing what you want to do.
+ Take individuals whose career or accomplishments you admire to lunch or interview them for an article. Ask them how they became what they are.
5 PROBLEM: You have a fear of writing what you most need to write. You don’t want to face it. You are afraid of what people will think of you. You worry about the legality (or the ethics) of writing about other people. Richard Bach wrote, “We teach best what we most need to learn.” By the same token, we write what we most need to read. Writer Mridu Khullar Relph says that writing is most difficult when we resist saying the things, we know we must say, resist exploring the emotions we want to explore, or resist feeling the pain that will come when we tell our truths. Emotional resistance creates creative resistance.
WHAT TO DO: Write first, worry later. You cannot simultaneously write freely and hold back, so make the following pact with yourself: You will write what needs to be written, feeling all the feels that need to be felt, and only after you have done that will you begin to think about how (or if) you want to make your story public. You simply must separate the creative process from the concern about outcomes and trust that when it’s time to consider outcomes, there will be all manner of mentors and people who have been where you are to guide the way. +Sometimes it’s helpful or even necessary to get emotional support – from compassionate family members, friends, and, yes, even a therapist – as you write about painful things. (Be certain that there is not a conflict of interest – i.e. that you’re not asking the very people you’re writing about to support you).
6 PROBLEM: You are depressed. Sometimes we are truly suffering from clinical, diagnosable depression, which makes writing feel like dragging a tractor out of a mudslide with your bare hands. When I was younger and suffering from depression, I was told (and believed) that depression led to better art. I bought into this idea until the day I looked around and realized that although I had produced filing cabinets full of writing, nothing I’d written held together. There wasn’t a complete story or essay in sight, nothing that I could submit to anywhere.
WHAT TO DO: Getting treatment for depression will not make you less profound, and it will make you more productive. Often, we buy into the idea that our depression makes us profound because we need to believe our pain is worth something.
+ If you’ve been depressed longer than a few weeks, seek therapy. Your writing will thank you.
7 PROBLEM: You are a perfectionist, stuck in revision hell. You can’t move forward because you are too busy “perfecting” your work. There’s a difference between revising and tinkering. Revision addresses the overall structure and/or organization of your piece, as well as the mechanics, language choices, narrative arc, and point of view. Tinkering is when you play with a word or sentence here or there, but the overall effect on the piece is minimal. It is possible to get stuck in both revising AND tinkering, the result being that you never show it to anyone or submit it because you are never “finished.”
WHAT TO DO: Perfectionism is fear masquerading as commitment to craft. It’s time to acknowledge the fear. Know you join a long, celebrated list of people who have the same fear – that their work is never good enough – and then set a goal for submission that is not too far in the future. Tell your plan to a friend or your writers group and ask them to hold you accountable.
+ Realize that in a dangerous world, fear seeks to protect us, but there is little true danger in the writing world save for the pain of rejection. The sooner you accept that you’re going to receive some, the sooner you can get a start on submitting.
+ Let your fear speak. Let it write you a letter. Actually sit down and pen it to yourself in its voice. Then read the letter with open-minded and openhearted affection. Let your fear know you hear it. You can’t kill your fear, but you can acknowledge it’s there and move forward anyway. This is the definition of courage.
+ My husband’s high school had a saying painted on the wall: “Avoid failure. Never try.” Is this really what you want?
8 PROBLEM: You are on the wrong path. It is possible to choose unwisely for ourselves, or to choose a path that is merely adjacent to where we want to be. Some people who really want to be writers find themselves “next door” as teachers or editors. Some who deeply want to write short stories find themselves working as reporters. But are these professions feeding your craft or distracting from it?
WHAT TO DO: Take a clear-eyed view of what you’re doing versus what you want to be doing. How are they the same? How are they different? Sometimes we realize the two paths are not so far apart or that we are more satisfied with where we are than we realized. But other times we realize it’s time to switch paths.
+ As with so many of our distractions, fear is often to blame for our resistance to following our true desired path. Get clear about what frightens you. Sometimes we are buying into an old narrative (“You can’t make money as a ____”). Sometimes we’d rather do well at something that’s less fulfilling than potentially fail at something that means a lot to us. If this is the case, you might want to rethink your definition of what it means to fail.
9 PROBLEM: You speak negatively to yourself. You say things like “Nobody will ever read this” and “I’ll never find a publisher” and “Everything on this subject has already been said.” Negative self-talk is the bane of our creative life. It is one of the most corrosive forces we have to combat if we are to allow ourselves to write. As the master of our own brain, it’s up to us to recognize the stories ours is concocting and to shut those stories down.
WHAT TO DO: It often helps to know exactly what we’re up against. Write down the negative, shaming, distracting, angry things you tell yourself. Now imagine saying these things to a friend you care about or a child while they are trying to work. Sometimes we can’t fathom how destructive our own narratives are until we imagine subjecting other people to them.
+ The next time you are writing, notice when the negative voices pop up and ask yourself immediately, “What would be more helpful to hear?” If you can’t access that kind voice inside yourself, can you access the kind voice of a friend and hear what they might say to you instead? Taming our negative self-talk is not a quick fix, but your life will greatly improve in all areas once you start to challenge the hurtful messages your brain is feeding you.
10 PROBLEM: You believe you will never be as good as the other writers out there. Bonnie Friedman (Writing Past Dark) calls envy “the writer’s disease.” During the time I was racking up rejections from publishers for my book, my husband was racking up accolades for his art. The envy I felt led to one of the most painful times of my life, and it was the biggest waste of my time because, in the end, it took me further from my writing goals than any other distraction.
WHAT TO DO: Stop looking around. I can’t stress this enough. There will always be someone out there who you feel is doing better than you. I used to think the fix was to focus on those doing worse than me, but I was wrong. The fix is to stop comparing yourself completely. Only when I was able to look away from my husband’s career track and return my gaze to my own was I able to stop the pain and move forward.
+ Ask yourself why you are writing. My answer at that time was, “To make a difference for people suffering from addictions.” As long as I was aligned with my purpose, I was able to keep a clear-eyed view of my own goals, and it ceased to matter what my husband was doing or getting.
11 PROBLEM: You’re going through some life changes. When I was about to move into my new house, people told me to forget about writing for a while, that moving and getting settled were going to eat up all my motivation. They’re crazy, I thought. I’ve got this. I did not have this. I didn’t write for a month. Know that during times like these you can’t fight the forces of life and change, and that’s OK.
WHAT TO DO: Make time to stay connected to your writing. Sometimes just doing the smallest amount can keep us grounded.
+ Can you look at your writing project for just five minutes each day? Open the file of whatever you’re working on and simply read through it?
+ If you simply can’t get to your writing, don’t beat up on yourself. It will still be there when you return – and a fallow period can lead to unexpected harvests.
+ Set a date to return to your project. Tell the whole universe your date. Don’t stand your project up.
12 PROBLEM: You can’t handle rejection. Rejection sucks. It never feels good, and it can stop us in our tracks. No matter how much we know that rejection happens for many reasons – your submission comes at the wrong time, isn’t a good fit for where you sent it, etc. – we almost ALWAYS think it’s a judgment on the writing. Whether it is or isn’t, rejection is a part of the writing business, and you have to keep going, whatever it takes. The best and most famous writers have been rejected, many of them numerous times.
WHAT TO DO: Submit more. This may seem counterintuitive, but the numbers are in your favor: the more you submit, the more you up your chances of getting accepted. Also, when you have several pieces circulating, each rejection doesn’t feel world-ending since you still have other irons in the fire.
+ Join a group of writers, in person or online, who are also submitting their work. The camaraderie will be a salve, and you will come to see that rejection both does and does not define a writer.
+ Don’t fight the pain of rejection. Acknowledge it. Share your disappointment. Then get up, dust yourself off, and get back on the horse. We all do it.
13 PROBLEM: You are JUST SO FRUSTRATED! You’re frustrated by your projects, by the obstacles in your way, by rejection, by expectation, by the energy it takes to keep going.
WHAT TO DO: “Frustration is not an interruption of the process, frustration is the process,” writes Elizabeth Gilbert, bestselling author of Eat, Pray Love. “The frustration, the hard part, the obstacle, the insecurities, the difficulty, the ‘I don’t know what to do with this thing now,’ that’s the creative process. And if you want to do it without encountering frustration and difficulty, then you’re not made for that line of work.”
+ Frustration is simply a product of your own brain telling you that things aren’t going as they should. There is no “right” way your writing should be going, there is only the way it IS going. This is reality, pure and simple.
+ The first line of M. Scott Peck’s best-selling book The Road Less Travelled is “Life is difficult.” He goes on to say that the sooner you accept this as fact and stop wishing it was some other way, the easier life becomes. The same is true for writing. It’s hard. For everyone. The sooner you can stop expecting it not to be hard for you, the better off – and less frustrated – you’ll be.
14 PROBLEM: You are stuck in the narrative and don’t know how to move forward. In my writing office, I have a wooden replica of a TWA airplane that is 3.5 feet long and 4 feet wide. It is held up by a steel rod on a table and is aimed downward. This is my visual metaphor for how I almost always feel when I am writing: like I’m in a perpetual nosedive, and I don’t know how to pull up and out of it.
WHAT TO DO: You move forward by moving forward. Too often we are looking for some piece of information or insight or idea that will move us forward when, in fact, most of the time we have to just proceed even without enough information.
+ “How long should it take me to write an essay?” I once asked my mentor, frustrated by the slow pace at which I was making forward progress. “As long as it takes you,” she answered. This was unhelpful, since my real question was, “What’s the secret key to unlocking this essay and why are you hiding it from me?” But you can’t hurry the process or make the process something it isn’t. So much of writing comes down to trusting that you will figure out the way by keeping your rear in the chair.
+ Gift yourself not just the time but also the patience to figure things out.
+ Forgive yourself for not being amazing at this. Just keep going and trust that there will eventually be a light at the end of the tunnel.
15 PROBLEM: You are addicted to social media or other distractions and, sorry, you’re not sorry. We are all addicted to the intermittent reinforcement of alerts, messages, and breaking news. Unfortunately, the very instrument upon which we do our work is also the thing that delivers these alerts. Studies have shown that it takes us 20 minutes to return to our task with full concentration after checking email one time.
WHAT TO DO: These strategies can help you maintain focus and avoid the siren call of online distractions.
+ Do your research before you write a word. If you research as you write, you’ll constantly be flipping back and forth between online and off, and more likely to get pulled in different directions as you find new things that catch your attention. If, during the actual writing, you discover additional things you need to look up, make a note of them at the bottom of your document (or on paper) and move on. You can fill in the blanks later.
+ Turn off the internet. If shutting down your browser isn’t enough, actually disconnect the cable or unplug your modem. Or go somewhere where there’s no Wi-Fi and write on a laptop. (Don’t worry. The internet will still be there when you get back.)
+ Use a distraction-minimizing app. Writeroom and Writer.app are two good ones. Basically, these programs are for writing text…and nothing else. They block out the rest of your computer with a black (or otherwise faded) background.
+ Shut down everything – that means your mail program, messaging apps on your phone, games – everything.
+ Turn off the radio and TV. Background noise is almost never a good thing for a writer.
+ Clear your desk. Visual clutter is a subconscious distraction. Instead of spending time sorting through your papers (a distraction-lover’s distraction), collect them in a pile and put them in a drawer or another room to sort through later. Same thing with pens and knickknacks and other clutter – toss them in a drawer and sort them out later.
+ Tell others when you’re in Do Not Disturb mode. If you have a certain time of the day when you write, let everyone know when that is so they can save their questions or interruptions for when you’re finished working.
+ Take breaks. Not too many, not too few. Move around for five minutes every hour, and then get back to writing. It’s great if you can take a break at a place in your process when you know what comes next. Taking a break when you are stuck can make it much harder to return to the work.
+ Know what helps YOU get back to work. For me, going for a walk often means I return with a new (and kinder) perspective. Some people swear by mundane tasks like laundry or ironing.
+ How can you make what you’re doing more fun, or at least more tolerable? Often I write better on days when I have a fun thing planned in the evening. I’m looking forward to it, so it becomes my reward for staying focused. When all else fails… Go to conferences! It helps to meet like-minded people with similar goals and challenges. Success builds on itself. Have you had success in the past? Do you have wonderful acceptance letters or even encouraging rejection letters? Read over these. Post the most encouraging ones where you can see them. Have gratitude for what’s working. Celebrate when you meet one of the small goals you set for yourself. If you don’t celebrate the small successes, it can feel hopeless, like you are having no success at all.
Dana Shavin’s essays have appeared in Oxford American, Psychology Today, The Sun, Bark, Fourth Genre, Alaska Quarterly Review, Parade.com, and others.
She has been a lifestyle columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press since 2002. She is the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist, and is a certified professional life coach.
A complete list of publications can be found at danashavin.com.
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WHAT TO READ WHEN YOU’RE STUCK 1. Writing Past Dark, by Bonnie Friedman 2. Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott 3. On Writing, by Stephen King 4. If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland 5. Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert 6. Finding Your Writer’s Voice. Thaisa Frank and Dorothy Wall 7. Art & Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland 8. The International Freelancer blog, by Mridu Khullar Relph |