If You Think THINKING About Your Writing is Hard – Try NOT Thinking About It

Have you ever had your mind go blank when you sat down to write?

Really?  Have you? 

Image: thenextweb.com

I’m guessing your mind did not go blank.  I’m guessing it just went somewhere else.  What we call a block is perhaps a distraction, more than anything.  Consider this:

I was surprised this morning by one of the daily feeds I read.  Science Daily is revealing a study that shows that it actually takes more work—more mental effort—to stop thinking than to continue.  They first explain something we already know.  Thinking takes energy.  The surprise came when it was discovered that interrupting a thought, that forcing yourself to stop thinking takes more energy still. 

From time to time I write about Writer’s Block, or Writer’s Blah but, to tell the truth, this is something I’ve never considered.

But, think about it.  Have you ever come back from a vacation more tired than when you went?  Perhaps there is something to this… something we need to consider as writers.

How To Write When You Have Nothing To Say

In case you don’t want to wade through the article for the answer, it’s this: just write.

A major fear, I think, of people who set themselves the seemingly impossible task of saying something new and fresh on a blog, a novel—or any writing venue—once or more per day is, “what if I don’t have anything to say?”

I am immediately reminded of the audio comedy sketch wherein the Sports Reporter is interviewing the centipede as the many-legged bug is waking along the street.
“How do you keep from tripping over your own feet,” he asks. …at which time the centipede starts to think about it, trips, and falls down.

“But, Reverend Wright! What does this parable mean?”

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Heh. Glad you asked. Brothers and Sisters, we are talking about a myth. The myth of Writers Block. It does not exist.

“But wait!” You exclaim, “It does! I have it even as I type this… Oh. Wait a minute. I think I get it.”

I think you get it, too. But for the rest of us in the hall today, perhaps you could elucidate?

“I think what you are saying is that Writer’s Block isn’t so much as a stoppage as it is a cause for taking a detour.”

Right in one. Look at it like this: You’re in the middle of an important scene. Your character is held captive by a gun-toting baddie with little or no respect for human life. Hero is bound. Time is running out, and you need a good escape, but nothing springs to mind. Your brain shuts down, and you find yourself humming the lyrics to Beethoven’s Fifth under your breath. In other words, you’re dead in the water.

This is the time to stop what you’re doing. If you buy into the myth that you are blocked, you will be. If, on the other hand, you set the troublesome scene aside and move to another scene, one that is perhaps amorphously outlined, one that can, perhaps, go just about anywhere, you will find you have side-stepped the supposed blockage.

“But, reverend, that means…”

Yes.  That means that what appears to be a Writer’s Block is no more than a ROAD block.  And what do we do when the road is blocked?

“We… we… well, we back up, and look for another way to get where we’re going.  I see!  I see!  It isn’t that I don’t have anything to say, it’s just that the particular road I’m on RIGHT NOW… is the wrong road for me.  Today.”

There you go.

“But… but, what if I try to switch roads and STILL find I have nothing to say?”

I um… I’ve got nothing to say about that.

Note:  Actually, Reverend Wright has lots to say about that, and will be getting to it in the near future.

Writer’s Block: When your imaginary friends won’t talk to you.

How Many Ideas Do You Have In a Day?

 How many ideas do you have in a day, a week, a month?  How many ideas will you have in your lifetime?  A better question might be, how many ideas that occur to you will be truly and blindingly wonderful?

It has been argued that the “ah-ha!” feeling we get from time to time is more a function of brain chemistry than true brilliance, but really, how can you tell?  I have also heard it said that the mind cannot distinguish the real from the vividly imagined.  If you have an idea that stops you cold, that chills you, that spreads a smile over your face… and it is only chemistry… so what?  That doesn’t mean you can’t use it.  It doesn’t mean you can’t improve it, and make it wonderful.

Writers are creatures of the mind.  The internal world of imagination is where we live, where we thrive, where we do our best work. 

Image: thebsreport.wordpress.com

The trick is to let it happen.

I believe that what we call writer’s block is more a case of getting to the river and finding the bridge is out, and being so disappointed that we forget there is more than one bridge, more than one road.  Being stopped cold just when you need an idea doesn’t mean your ideas have stopped, just that something has gotten in the way of one specific thought.  Ideas continue to flow.  They happen with every breath.

If you are like me—and if you’ll admit it—you probably have hundreds, perhaps thousands of ideas every day.  That’s good.  It’s good exercise.  Better still, it’s important to make the distinction that you are an idea factory.  But that doesn’t mean—

—Wait a minute… you said a thousand ideas a day?

Yeah.  I did.

But…

Well right.   There’s a hitch.  Mostly our ideas are fleeting, each occluding the previous thought, driving them from memory.  Those few that are so dazzling that we are forced to stop and make note are the ones we give ourselves credit for. 

The truth is, every idea we have is a good one.  If we could find a way to record, sort, file, and retrieve all of our ideas at will, writer’s block would be a thing of the past.

What I want you to take away from the post is this: You are an idea machine.  You are a brilliant computer, a rainbow maker; you not only feed on the world each day, but you breathe life back  into the day. 

And those ideas that get passed by?  You know the ones.  The ideas that you have when you can’t get to your cell phone to tell someone, or your digital recorder is out of reach, or the pen is out of ink, or you know you can’t get out of the shower and dried off fast enough to retain… those ideas…  they aren’t lost.  They’ve just gone back into the idea mill, and they’ll pop out again when you least expect it. 

Ideas are life.

Your thoughts?

Nine Words – That Can Change Your Life

I’ve gone through a bit of a slump lately.  Not so much writers block, as a big case of I don’t wanna.  While the result is the same thing, the process by which I arrived there is very different.

Has that ever happened to you?  You’re full of ideas, you know where your stories, or essays, or series installments need to go, and how to get them there, and yet, you just don’t wanna?

It isn’t a good place to be if you think of yourself as a writer.  It’s even worse, if you define yourself as a writer.  A great thinker once said, “if who you are is what you do, then when you don’t, who are you?”  This is a sloppy paraphrase, but I’m sure you get the picture.

OK, so, if you’re in a slump, and don’t want to write anything, what is this entry all about?

You know?  I can always count on you to ask those wonderful questions.

Something happened some months ago, and I remembered it this morning.  It has made a difference.

One of the things I do when I can’t (or won’t) write is to go on-line and read the profiles of new writers.  I look to see if people have things to say about themselves that spark my interest.  The truth is, I’m as much interested in the writer as the writing, and a well-written profile draws me every time.

One day, not so long ago, I found a person who had yet to post any of his writing, but he said something in his profile that rocked my world.

OK, OK, so what did this person say that was so moving?

Glad you asked.  Here it is:

Under his Claim to Fame he wrote, “I’m a better writer today than I was yesterday.”

Photo: jameswoodward.wordpress.com

I am often moved by the writing of others, especially those of you who write about writing.  But this… this brought tears to my eyes.  And it does again, even now.

If you have written for any length of time, and have posted much of your work for review, you may have had this experience:  Someone reads and reviews one of your early works, and you want to send them a message and say, “No!  Wait.  Read some of my newer stuff.  If you’re going to read me, read me as I am now!”

Does that ring a bell with you?  Are you a better writer today than you were yesterday?

I don’t know if this writer will write the next great novel (or if he already has, and is just lurking around), but he has moved me.  He has inspired me.  He has helped me get back to the keyboard.

I am so very grateful.

He wrote nine words, that’s all, just nine words, and he was talking about himself, and yet he reached out with those nine words and pushed me out of my slump.

Wow.

Finally, I challenge each of you, and I mean this, do it, I think it will make a difference to you.  Get up now, go find a mirror, and look into it.  Say those nine words to yourself.  Go on.  I’ll wait.  I’d love to hear if his words moved you like they did me.

Oh, and one more thing.

I’m a better writer today than I was yesterday.

When the Writing Wilts

It happens.  Yeah.  It happens.

Every now and then we lose the spark, we forget why we do it.  We get tired.  We get bored.  It happens.

I’m not talking about Writer’s Block, I’m talking about Writer’s Blah.

You’ve been writing for a long time, for years, perhaps, maybe even decades.  You’ve been writing to deadlines.  You’ve been scratching your head and coming away with a handful of hair.  It got hard.  It got tough.

Then you hit the wall.

…and the wall turned out not to be the old Writer’s Block at all… not the normal one, anyway.

Writer’s Blah happens when you’ve just gotten bored.  You’ve spent your time doing all the right things.  You keep a notepad by your bed, you carry a digital recorder when you go for a walk or a drive, you watch TV and listen to the radio for inspiration.  You’ve got it down.

Still, for some reason, the ideas are all starting to taste like turnips.  It isn’t all that exciting any more.  Well… why not?  More importantly, what can you do about it?

It’s time for a shake-up.

It is time to take a look at your old work.  It is time to go shopping in your own closet (of work).

If you are like most of us, you have a pile of old pieces.  They may be stories, unfinished novels, or like me, a two-foot high pile of notes and yellow stickies, each waiting to be rediscovered.

Even if you’ve written them out… even if you’ve posted them on a blog or to your online writing community, even if you’ve sold them, they are excellent idea starters.

Do you think that James Cameron is the only person who can take an old idea and breathe new life into it?  Not a chance.

Dig out your old notes.  Rehash some old ideas.  Maybe all you need to do to reignite an idea is to change the title.

Today’s the day.

Well?

Don’t just sit there.  Go to it!

Writers Block, Sleep and Cats

Some days there seems to be a theme in the Blogosphere–at least in the corner of it I inhabit.  Today it seems that Writers Block is getting a lot of attention.  Earlier today I wrote about Creative Misplacement, and while the topic wasn’t exactly Writers Block, it is a way of dealing with it.  After I wrote Creative Misplacement, my brain went south and I found myself wondering what I could write next?

Then I noticed my cat sleeping on the bed.  Lamont Cranston, a five-year-old black short-hair sleeps most of the time.  He conveniently sleeps through the night, gets up early with me, and has a romp around the house, eats his breakfast, and by 8:30 or 9:00 has gone back to sleep.  Sometimes I get jealous.  He gets a lot more sleep than me, and the really unfair thing about it is that he doesn’t need it.  I do.

That got me thinking.  Every now and again, when I’m feeling jealous and a tad spiteful that Lamont is asleep and I have to be up, I go and try to wake him.  Sometimes he’ll get up, walk off looking for cat things to do, but usually I get stared at through one opened eye for a moment, and then he goes back to dreamland.

On the other hand, if awakened in the night, the chances are my old reticular formation will kick in, and sleep will elude me for what seems like hours.

It struck me this morning why it is that Lamont can sleep any time, anywhere, and I can’t.  He isn’t attached to sleep.  Sleep doesn’t matter to him–not like an imperative–as it does to me.  It is my attachment to sleep, that thing that makes sleep so valuable, so needed, that makes it hard for me go get.

Now, it may be a bit of a leap, but I think that oft-times, Writers Block works the same way.  What makes a block a block is our attachment to getting through it.  I say that this is also the reason that dropping the current blocked project and working for a time on another works.

How can you use this in your daily life?  I dunno.  I think I can.  I think that understanding a problem is better than half way to resolving it.

13 Ways to Prevent Writer’s Block

Writer’s Block.  Two nasty words, right? Here are 13 ways I use to get through it.  Oh, and read through to the end for a special FOURTEENTH method.

1. Keeping a notebook (a digital recorder, a smart phone, etc.) for stray notes handy gives you a backlog of ideas that can be brought into a story when the well runs dry.
2. Introduce a new character.  A fresh face, a love interest, an unexpected villain, a call from the father thought dead for years… and the way your main character reacts to them can make all the difference.
3. Change or reveal the secret motivations of a supporting character.  The annoying friend is actually an enemy, the beautiful, confident woman is terrified of everything, and only acting.
4. Get away from your work.  Even if you are facing a deadline, sitting in front of a blank page or screen will only frustrate you.  Go outside.  Move around.  Change your perspective.
5. If a page or a chapter has stopped you, move on to a new scene.  Much as a movie is shot out of sequence for budgetary and convenience reasons, your story need not be written in a straight line.
6. Are you stopped because of quality issues?  Is the current passage not as good as you think it should be?  It’s OK!  Carry on with the idea anyway, keep the flow going.  You can dress it up later.
7. Pick up, pack up, and move.  Try writing in a different room, go to the library, the park, a coffee shop.  Changing your surroundings can change your state of mind.
8. Disconnect from the Internet.  Sometimes what feels like a block is only a distraction.  You can read email or browse the net later.
9. Stop.  Write the scene as though you were describing it to a friend in a letter.  Get it all out.  Once you’ve done this, changing it to fit the style of your project becomes easy.
10. DON’T QUIT.  It is easy to stop when you’re blocked, but do you want to reward blocking?  Instead, quit for the day in the middle of something that works, then reward yourself with a tasty treat.  Get into the habit of acknowledging what works, not what fails.
11. Stop trying to do it all in one sitting.  Reach into your story and work on one small piece.  Buff it up.  Make it shine.  Don’t try to swallow the elephant whole.
12. Write something else.  Writer’s Block seldom means you can’t write.  Typically you just can’t write on the current project.  Move to something that moves you.  Get your rhythm back, then when things are going the way you want, switch back to the “blocked” project.
13. Go back several pages and read forward.  Finding the pace and flow of your earlier work can help you gain the momentum to get through the road block.

SECRET METHOD (14):  Take a break and write a list of ways to bust through Writer’s Block.

Jump the Shark

In the world of television, Jumping the Shark is considered the kiss of death.  It typically means that the writers are out of ideas and the viewers are out of patience, so something out of the ordinary is done.  A change of cast, the introduction of an implausible situation, something totally out of character for the show, for example.  In nearly every case, a show that has Jumped the Shark is on its way out.

But wait!  Is this concept always bad?  Is it something you, a writer who may not be involved in TV writing can use?

Absolutely!

One of the best Blockbusters I know (erm… that’s Writer’s Block Buster) is to go off on a tangent.  Now, before you get up in arms, consider this:

Taking your plot off in an unexpected direction, revealing that your tough Private Investigator is an alien, having the God of the Incas intervene in a street fight on the Lower East Side, or having the population of your central locale turn into cats is mighty weird.  But it may only be a sidestep, and it certainly doesn’t need to actually make it into your manuscript.

Stopping to smell the flying pizza, to gaze lovingly into the eyes of the man-eating clothes dryer or having a philosophical discussion about Plato’s Cave with a goldfish might be just the shaking loose exercise you need to move on.

Besides, it’s fun.

10 Reasons I Prefer the Company of Writers

1. Writer’s block doesn’t keep a writer from talking.
2. A writer’s solution to a problem may not be practical, but it will be inventive.
3. Writers are MORE FUN.  They are Neurotic by nature, and Schizophrenic by choice.
4. Writers have an opinion about EVERYTHING.
5. A writer can argue both sides.  And win.
6. A writer can steal a character from a person on the street and never feel guilty.
7. Writers are never stopped because their character wants to do the impossible.
8. Writers who get their characters into trouble can go on to the next scene and say “Having gotten out of the volcano, Johnny Macho called his girlfriend, Flo.”
9. Reality is for wimps.
10. Writers come up with interesting lists of “Ten Reasons”