First, thanks for all the well-wishes. I really appreciate them. I’m not quite back to full power just yet, but much better, hence this delayed but still present blog post.
“Writer’s block” is a term that gets used for everything from the pathological inability to produce a grocery list to the inability to stop checking Twitter instead of writing. That’s why I generally refer to “getting stuck,” rather than to “writer’s block.” I know a number of writers who happily deny that there is any such thing as writer’s block, but I don’t know any who won’t admit to having gotten stuck on something now and again.
Because there are a lot of ways of getting stuck, and a lot of reasons for getting stuck, there are also quite a lot of things one can try to get un-stuck. The first and most common recourse seems to be powering through – just sit down and crank out some pages, don’t worry if they’re good or not, or where they’re heading, just get them down. Repeat day after day until things start flowing again.
This method works pretty well for the folks who are simply distracted by nice weather or Facebook, because all it takes is the focus and determination to sit down in the chair and crank out those pages.
The trouble is that it doesn’t always work, and when it doesn’t, it’s usually because the writer has a reason for being stuck. These include:
- Normal process. The first possibility isn’t really getting stuck at all; it’s misdiagnosis. The writer is simply the sort of burst writer who writes madly for a couple of days, producing a great wodge of words very quickly, and then produces nothing for a week while their backbrain prepares the next wodge. There’s a rhythm to the production, the same as there is for the writer who spends an hour in the morning writing 500 words and then writes nothing for 23 hours before producing the next 500 words the following morning. It’s just that for this writer, the cycle takes days or weeks instead of hours.
There are also writers who get stuck regularly at major turning points in the story. This is also part of their normal process, but it’s more of a struggle than the daily or weekly rhythm, because the story may go in a number of totally new directions, and the writer has to pick one and only one.
In both these cases, all the writer really needs is to recognize that the delays are part of their normal process (which can be tricky if most of the writer’s friends are daily-grind writers) … and get a feel for what, exactly, that means, so they can tell when they really do get stuck. Just as a two-pages-a-day-every-day writer knows they’re stuck when they haven’t written anything for four or five days, a fourteen-pages-in-two-days-every-other-week writer may not realize they’re stuck until they’ve gone a month or so without writing. Once they recognize that it’s not their normal process, they can figure out what the real problem is, and go from there.
- Fear. The writer is suffering from a severe attack of nerves. Maybe something tricky is coming up, and they’re not sure they’ll be able to pull it off; maybe they ran into their old writing teacher yesterday and they’re suddenly positive he’ll be ashamed of whatever they’re working on; maybe it’s the old “I’ll never get this published and I’ll look incompetent and foolish in front of millions of readers” problem. Whatever the underlying reason, this one boils down to worry that the writing won’t be “good enough;” that their plot is clichéd, their characters cardboard, and their style pedestrian; that their plot or characters aren’t the best choice; in short, that the writer is making some horrible writing mistake.
In this case, fixing the problem starts from the recognition that the problem is one of fear and/or lack of confidence. Once one knows that, one can either give in (change the plot to write something less intimidating or more acceptable to the teacher) or determine to ignore the emotion (“feel the fear and do it anyway”).
In about 90% of cases, I recommend doing it anyway, using whatever tricks one needs to use to persuade oneself to just do it. Backing off from the hard, stretchy, scary thing just leaves it sitting there, waiting for next time. Sooner or later, you’ll have to learn to do that … or else you will never, ever get past your current level of writing ability. Tell yourself you’ll publish under a pseudonym, or that you’ll do the hard bit for practice and then write the “real” scene that everyone will like, or that this is just a hackwork manuscript that’s supposed to be cliché-ridden and cardboard – whatever it takes to get yourself to do that thing. Nothing is ever as scary once you have succeeded in getting through it once.
- Error. The writer has made a mistake and their backbrain has gone on strike until they find and fix it. In my case, it’s usually because I made a character do or say something that the plot calls for but that isn’t consistent with the way I’ve presented them so far, and I have no explanation for why they are acting out of character.
This problem takes me forever to find, but once I do, I have three choices: rewrite the problem scene (and everything that follows) so that the character stays in-character; rewrite everything up to the problem scene so that what the character does in that scene becomes in-character, or come up with a background reason why this “out-of-character” behavior really is in-character, and work in some hints before the problem scene and a revelation somewhere else down the line. Or in other words, if this is the problem, correct the mistake, correct everything else so it’s not a mistake, or tweak things until it’s not a mistake.
These are probably the most common reasons for stuckness in my experience; next post, I’m going to talk about some slightly less common reasons fro getting stuck.
I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but the three reasons why I get stuck are:
1. Static Friction, when it’s just harder to start writing than to keep going once I do start.
2. Need to scout ahead, when I need to stop and do noodling/outlining/brainstorming/storyboarding about the scenes and events to come before I can start the actual writing of them.
3. Took a wrong turn, which Our Gracious Hostess refers to as “3. Error” above.
And a wrong diagnosis is useless and worse than useless for getting unstuck. Which creates a “meta” reason of “4. Can’t figure out why I’m stuck.”
Your first one is what one of my colleagues calls “a profound disinclination to write,” which results in no progress. I’m never quite sure whether to call that being stuck or not, since it’s not the writing that’s the problem, it’s more the fact that you don’t have a boss to make you go in to work when you really don’t feel like it.
Your second one, I’d call part of your normal process. You don’t plan the whole story out in detail through to the end before you begin, so you have to stop and do outlining/brainstorming/etc. periodically. The noodling/outlining/etc. is a necessary part of your writing process; it just happens in mid-draft instead of at the beginning.
Yes, noodling in mid-draft is part of my normal process. But it becomes a form of Stuck if I need to noodle but don’t realize it and try to power through, instead. Or the noodling becomes a cat-vacuuming exercise when I actually do need to power through.
My three forms of Stuck all look a lot alike to me when I first encounter one of them. That’s what makes them forms of Stuck, rather than “OK, I know what I need to do now to fix this. Carry on.”
I get stuck because I don’t know how to handle what happens next.
Or else — and this is chiefly outlines — because what I thought happened next doesn’t work. That one I usually fix by making the opposite happen.
I get stuck when I don’t know what happens next.
Which, unfortunately, happens a lot.
My reason for getting stuck is psychological, and well beyond the fear aspect: loss of faith in the process. On my first really long work, I looked ahead to see where the novel was going—and I hated it. Furthermore, there didn’t seem to be anyway to veer from the “inevitable” destination, and I simply stopped. Every effort I’ve made to get that piece going again has failed.
We often told not to look behind; for me, looking ahead is the real killer.
Two possibilities: First, you may be the sort of writer who should NOT ever know for certain how things will turn out, because knowing sabotages your motivation. Second, you may be the sort of writer whose stuff sets up in concrete incredibly fast, so once you “see” one ending, you can’t imagine alternatives.
You might try mentally taking the building blocks you began with (characters, setting, fundamental problem) and thinking about the destination you would love to see (ignoring whatever you’ve written – think of it as writing your own fix-it fanfiction). Then work backwards until you get to the beginning without referring to your current draft. This should give you a path to follow that will get you somewhere you like.
If that doesn’t work, I recommend the not-thinking-more-than-a-chapter-or-two-ahead thing. Or straight-up pantsing.
#1 is something I’m having to accept about my process. There are going to be lag times — especially in the early days, around chapters 2-3, quite a long lag time. Like, months. I’m working on ways to shorten that, but I doubt it’s ever going to go away. I’ve learned the hard way that powering through it is not the right solution in that case.
#3 also sounds familiar. Or, frequently, that I’m just about to make a mistake, and my back-brain is stopping me before I fully commit it. Still have not persuaded my back-brain that it could just send a memo.
Somehow, when I get stuck, sitting down with my journal and writing about being stuck always seems to get me unstuck. I’ll write about being anxious about tackling the next scene and find that by the time I’m done writing about why I’m scared, I’m not scared any more; in fact I’m eager to get going. Or else I’ll stumble upon what’s stopping me: an upcoming wrong turn; a just-taken wrong turn; a detail that I’d forgotten that is actually key; an answer to the puzzle that *had* to be solved in order for me to make any progress at all. Free writing about the difficulty—whatever it is—always turns up what I need and solves the problem.
The trick for me is realizing that I need to sit down and write about my process. If I skip a day of writing, that can be for legit reasons. But if I skip 2 days (unless it is the weekend, which is family time), it’s usually because there is a problem, but I don’t want to admit it to myself. It will often take a third skipped day to jolt me to my senses. I’m a steady 5-days-a-week writer, so if I hit 3 days back-to-back of not writing, something’s wrong.
Back when I had a writers group, a nearly sure-fire way for me to get unstuck was to whine to my writers group about how stuck I was. I’d write a big long kvetch about how I couldn’t get anything done, and by the time anyone responded, I’d have churned out pages. For me, though, it only worked if I was sure somebody else was listening. Apparently my back-brain likes to make me look silly in public.