Several times during the development of my novel I was afflicted with writer’s block. It happens to many writers--a condition where you are unable to write.
It comes in different variations. I find the most difficult is the mere inability to sit down in front of the keyboard. I look for reasons to procrastinate—the patio needs to be cleaned, the dog needs to be walked, it’s a nice day to go golfing, I need to stick bamboos slivers under my fingernails—blah, blah, blah. This can go on for days and even weeks. During the writing of Rules for Giving, after I’d created what I thought was a pivotal chapter with the introduction of a new character, I couldn’t bear to sit down and write again. It took me weeks. How am I going to do better than what I just finished?
Other times I can sit down at the keyboard, but I ‘m not happy with anything that comes up on the screen. The words don’t make any sense. They read as stilted and contrived. They don’t flow.
When I took writing classes in college, one of the exercises we did at the beginning of each class was to write for five minutes on whatever we wanted to write about—the weather, our mood, what was troubling us that day. It was a way of warming up. Trying to get past writer’s block. I went to a writing class recently where the instructor had us do the same thing. As a class we never looked at this stuff. It got thrown away. But it broke the ice.
I am not disciplined enough to remember to do this every time I sit down to write. Part of this lies in that the effort is so taxing that I don’t want to expend energy putting down words that don’t have purpose, that will never see the light of day.
My solution to writer’s block is a version of the writer’s exercise. I write. I write for whatever project I am writing on at that time, but I write. The goal is to write through the writer’s block. It’s mentally and emotionally exhausting. I curse a lot and I hit the delete key quite a bit, but it works. What I come up with is often very good. During the writing of the rough draft of Rules for Giving I needed a chapter that had to get me from Point A to Point B in the action so that I could move to the next chapter, which was much clearer in my mind. I had no idea how I was going to get there.
But I wrote through it. In the end, I had a good chapter, with some action and direction that carried me through for a couple of chapters.
Now that the rough draft is finished, I have found something worse than writer’s block—editor’s block. How did I cure that one? Keep checking this blog and I will tell you.
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