Tag: how-to-write

You have heard all the normal advice for writer’s block, haven’t you? Of course you have. Maybe nothing helped, or maybe you found them all stupid and boring.

I, too, have heard all the stupid boring advice for writer’s block: some of it helps, some of it doesn’t. What I’m here to offer is not the same thing – “be gentle to yourself, do little 15-minute exercises” – but something different, that will rattle you out of your ennui and get you back to work.

I am but one humble writer, and what works for me might not work for you. However, you’re here because nothing else helped, so maybe what I offer will.

These are the kinds of tips that polite writers won’t tell you, because, well … some of them seem mean-spirited. I’m a firm believer in not fighting our nature, but working with it to get the results we want. You’re not perfect, and I’m not either. Let’s get going.

What causes writer’s block in the first place?

Writer’s block is not a monolith, despite the name making it sound like a massive hunk of granite. There are different reasons for writer’s block, as noted by writing centers the world over. But I’m going to give you a basic summation of the ones that I have noted and experienced that apply specifically to fiction writing – ie, not academic writing, where you might genuinely not want to write because you don’t like the topic.

Lack of ideas. You have the urge to write but no idea what to write.

Lack of motivation. You have the idea but no desire to write it.

Choice paralysis. You have too many ideas and can’t pick what to do next.

Perfectionism. You know the writing won’t be perfect, so why bother?

The false finish. You’ve talked too much about your project and now you don’t feel like doing it anymore.

Overwhelm. The project seems too large and you have so many thoughts of what to put into it that you don’t know how you can put all the pieces together.

Distraction. You can’t stay focused long enough to get anything done. There are too many other interesting things to do with your life, or your brain’s been fried by constant social media dopamine hits (guilty as charged).

Discouragement. You feel you cannot compete with your favorite authors and the process to get there seems far too long.

While the suggestions I provide are not necessarily going to fix every single one of these, they can start to get the ball rolling. We really just need some inertia to start the process.

Identify where negative self-talk about writing is coming from.

One of the best things I have learned in therapy is defining where my negative self-talk really originates.

Yes, of course it’s daddy issues like 99% of the time.

But what’s key about that is that I am able to externalize the negative talk, which makes it easier to confront. I see that I have internalized a distorted and unpleasant idea of myself that may not be true. By returning to sender, I can replace that dispiriting idea with something more empowering.

As a light example, my father always called me a lazy slob. And it’s true that I am a very messy person, like many creatives are. But by recognizing it was my father saying that about me, I recognized that being messy isn’t some default state of mine. It’s something I can work on, or choose not to work on, depending on whether I think working on it will improve my life.

Does it matter that I have a floordrobe? Probably not. Does it matter that I haven’t backed up my writing files and am vulnerable to losing everything I’ve spent years creating if my hard drive crashes? Yes. All my files are kept on Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, my external hard drive, AND my C:// drive. Though they may not be perfectly synced if I’m still drafting, I can find the missing parts and recreate the final version if necessary.

Anyway, back to the main point. So many of us, when we try to write, are besieged by a bunch of negative voices that have made us think we’re uncreative, or stupid, or lazy, or whatever. We can figure out where that came from, which is almost certainly outside of ourselves, and then return it to sender.

Maybe you sit down to write and think, “I’m just not creative enough to write fiction.”

Who the hell told you that? Give me their name. Remember exactly what they said that gave you such a dumb idea.

Are they so special and important that they should have the honor of dictating your entire creative trajectory? Hell no. Return that idea to sender. It’s not your problem anymore.

You can do this with just about any negative self-talk you have, because it almost certainly originated from something someone said to you in your formative years, or maybe recently. And you will almost certainly start to have some negative self-talk crop up when you’re dealing with writer’s block. Confronting them clears the cobwebs from your head and offers a bright path forward, even before you’ve written a word.

Read terrible writing.

Writer’s block is often (but not always) a type of self-consciousness. You can’t get immersed in your own writing because you’re thinking about what other people will think when they read it, and now you’re thinking more about what other people are thinking than what you are thinking. Sounds really exhausting when it’s typed out like that, huh?

So we can fix that by just acknowledging that other people are also shit writers. Many of them are shittier than you.

Look, we know there is bad writing in the world, even as so many people defensively try to claim that writing is subjective and you can’t possibly rate anything. There are standards to writing. Some writing violates those standards so badly that you have to wonder whether the “person” may actually be a malicious cuttlefish performing a literary psyop to discombobulate the human species.

I’m sure that some very pure, very angelic writers are going to complain about me using other peoples’ bad writing as a way to motivate ourselves. Sorry to tell you this: humans are designed to compare themselves to other people, even those of us who are very intrinsically motivated. It’s one of the downsides of being a social species, and no amount of “we should be better” is going to completely eradicate comparison.

What I am suggesting is called downward comparison, a part of Social Comparison Theory. But what I am not suggesting is that you use this to gloat and feel peachy-keen about yourself. Certainly I would not say you should bully other writers (I’ve always been clear about this).

Instead, I’m saying you can break your writer’s block by workshopping how you would have fixed this bad writing. Imagine you are an editor who has been given a magic pen to resolve every single issue you find in this piece of work.

The process then becomes less about “I’m so great” and more about “what about this isn’t working, and why?” Now you’ve engaged your critical thinking. And now you can start thinking more critically about your own work because you have primed yourself to puzzle through issues. You’ll feel empowered to get back to work because you can more clearly see the problems in your project (or your idea for a project). It’s an aha moment disguised as sneering.

Use a word count spreadsheet.

I discussed this in exhaustive detail in my how to write faster post, so I will not belabor the point. You can read that article to get the whole idea, but basically you just make a spreadsheet and force yourself to write something every single day.

You could write one page. One paragraph. One sentence. Hell, one word even, and still count it as progress. But seeing that accountability metric is going to make you feel a little bad for only doing one sentence one day. So you’ll naturally want to do more, because you have activated self-competition: the most powerful form of motivation.

Do not edit during this time. You do not do any editing while you are in the active drafting stage of writing, because then you screw up your spreadsheet. The spreadsheet itself forces you to keep those processes separate (as they should be because they use different parts of the brain).

Gray out your text.

I do think freewriting (aka writing things by hand) can be helpful for very entrenched writer’s block. But I also understand that many people don’t like freewriting because they feel it’s not productive and will just cause more work for them. It’s frustrating to have done some of your best work in a notebook and then have to transcribe it, and this frustration can make you not want to freewrite at all. And then you’re still not writing.

We can get the benefits of freewriting without any of the hassle that introduces more friction into your process, which is the last thing we need for writer’s block. We also can get the benefits of a Freewrite machine (expensive!) without paying that much money.

Just turn your text light gray or even white while you’re writing. Then you can’t see what you’re doing so you can’t edit it. You can’t see how much you’ve done so you can’t rest on your laurels.

You may say, “Oh, but then I can’t use my spreadsheet.” Wrong! The spreadsheet formula I gave in my previous post just takes your current wordcount and then does some magic to determine how much you’ve written that day, as I showed in my now-ancient spreadsheet when I was first working on Poesy.

Yes, I really have been using this method for over two and a half years for every single project I do, and I am now working on the eighth book I’ve done this with. If that’s not proof of concept, I’m not sure what is.

You can also use gray text to keep yourself from revising once you’re done with a section. See something you think you won’t keep? Don’t remove it – gray it out, then leave a comment explaining what you want to do instead. You don’t lose any words and you’ve flagged a potential issue to deal with later. Your brain marks it as “done,” which relieves the pressure to edit.

Write fanfic about your own book.

Oh, I know, you’re so tired of hearing about fanfic, given that I talk about it all the time. I often discuss it in terms of how it can help you learn how to write, but here’s the thing: it can also help original fiction authors feel more comfortable with their stories.

Writer’s block for novelists, in addition to being a bit of performance anxiety, also contains a measure of pressure. We’re thinking about audience, reception, marketability, well before any of that really matters. Fanfic removes all those pressure points because it’s inherently designed not to be publishable. Yes, even AUs of your own canon.

What I love most about fanfic is that it is solely about the joy of writing and playing with concepts. It doesn’t have to be good, nor does it have to be marketable. You’re just messing around with your little toys, no different than someone fiddling with their ukulele or doodling in a notebook.

Another enjoyable part about making up fanfic about your own stories is that it is a remarkable way to stress-test your characters, as I discussed in using fanfic as practice for original fiction. You can identify what would remain after all the canon fixins’ have been stripped away. In fact, you may discern new things about your characters that never would have shown up in the canon.

Maybe your MC is a hardboiled detective and now you’re playing cowboys. Or maybe you have a fantasy series and you drop your characters in a coffee shop. Whatever. You get to mess around with them in an open sandbox and just enjoy being with them instead of feeling the pressure to make them do specific things. This reignites the joy you felt beforehand.

One key caveat here is that you should not actually post the fanfic anywhere, because then you’re sucked back into performing for an audience. I do not like Tumblr tag games for the same reason: they reward you for procrastinating rather than encouraging you to write. As I discuss in the next section.

The fanfic is just for playing. It is not for external validation. Write it in Notepad or whatever so it’s annoying to post anywhere, and then get back to work.

Take a vow of silence.

Once I have finished the outline for a book, I stop talking about it entirely. To anyone. Even to myself. I will not disclose anything about it, won’t freewrite about it, won’t complain about it to other people, nothing. If I catch myself talking about it, I force myself to stop.

The vow of silence is crucial for forcing motivation. The more I talk about a project, the less I actually want to do it because I’m getting the dopamine hits from talking about doing it. Since talking about it is inherently more pleasurable than the writing due to the immediate feedback, I’m shooting myself in the foot.

This is also the reason that I do not use the book names when I’m busy writing the book, except in blog posts. If I am talking about the book to anyone else, I call it Book 7 or whatever until I am done with it and it’s ready to be published. Book 7 implies a work in progress, like a beta version of a software, while the name implies that it is an actual product that will one day be available for sale. At least in my own brain; maybe you’re different.

Also because, gonna be so real with you, it feels a little cringey to say my book names out loud. I don’t know if other writers have that problem, but I feel a bit self-conscious when I verbally say, “You can go buy 9 Years Yearning here” or whatever. Agh, so ouchy. Can’t tolerate it.

So don’t post that you have writer’s block. Don’t try to explain the plot to anyone. Don’t endlessly relitigate it with friends or with whoever you talk about your books with. Don’t make it the star of your next therapy session. It doesn’t exist yet, and you’re the only one who can make it exist. And you can’t do that unless you do the work.

Pull yourself back to the moment when you wanted to be a writer.

Lastly, I think it’s so important to remind ourselves of how long we have truly come in our journey from time to time.

One of my favorite questions is “what made you want to be a writer?” As I say in my author profile, it all comes back to one singular moment when I won a school-wide writing contest.

While I was sick and missed the actual awards ceremony, I got to go to Olive Garden that night, which was a very special treat for a kid who grew up in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. Just a seven-year-old girl and her mom in a chain restaurant that seemed like a Michelin-star spot.

I always remember how incredible it felt to be acknowledged for something I did. Not a birthday, not a holiday, but something I produced with my own mind. I could make good things happen by putting words on paper. Isn’t that a kind of superpower?

Sure is, always has been. That’s the entire premise of High Poetry.

So whenever I get demoralized or feel writer’s block, I think back to that moment. I think about how limitless the world felt when I was a small child who had discovered the potential for happiness through words.

I think about how amazed she would be to learn that since then, I have written over 2 million words of fiction and published four books (soon to be five!) plus a novella. Her tiny mind would be blown clean out of her tiny blonde head.

And it’s her marvelment that inspires me. I want to impress my younger self even more. I want to make her incredibly proud to know that over two decades later, she’s still going strong. What else could ever be so important as delighting that little girl?

For her, I’ll smash even the biggest writer’s block and turn it into new material. No matter what stands in my way.

Writer’s block can feel daunting; it can even make us feel like we’ll never write again. But here, think about it this way. “Writer” suggests a verb, meaning if the verb is still verbing, the label still applies.

I joke that no one can prove I’m not immortal until the day I die. Likewise, they’re continually fooled into thinking I’m a writer because I keep pulling more words out from somewhere.

Keep up the charade, bestie. One word at a time.