Writers’ block conjures up images of the impoverished author, sitting at a typewriter, a blanket over his/her lap and a cigarette hanging despondently from stained teeth.
This malady has three main forms:
- Perfectionism: you know what you want to write but what you write is never good enough, or never expresses what you really mean, or doesn’t capture the soul of the subject;
- Motivation: you know you want to write, you might have the ideas, you might have the plot thought out and the characters described but somehow you just never have the time to write or never feel up to writing when you do;
- Direction: you have the desire to write, you probably even have a great setting or a great character but you just can’t write.
When broken down into these particular forms, writer’s block starts to make sense and can be easily dealt with.
Perfectionism
If you find yourself sitting at the computer hour after hour rewriting the same sentence, it probably means that you want your writing to be perfect. After all who doesn’t want to be perfect?
However, why would you want to write a manuscript which is so good it doesn’t need editing? And who does that anyway?
If you want a perfect manuscript you will not achieve it by rewriting that sentence 50 times. Although each sentence you write may be structurally perfect, a good story or a good novel is much more than the choice of words and the sentence structure. Professional writers who are successful have a holistic view of their work, if a sentence or paragraph isn’t quite right, that’s fine because after they have completed the work they can see whether it is really necessary and can see how best to alter it to fit the structure of the entire story. You see, if you really want to write the perfect story, you really need to forget about perfectionism.
Once you have forgotten about writing the perfect story it becomes much easier. Each line you write is no longer a work of art – it is the final copy which is the work of art. This means you are less emotionally involved with the manuscript and can see more clearly what needs to be cut, what needs to be extended and how to rephrase sentences to meet the overall needs of what you are writing.
There are a couple of good tasks which you can do to get you past the perfectionist mindset.
1. Free writing: sit down and spend 15 minutes writing about what-ever comes to mind. Make sure the writing is continuous, that you do not pause to think about it. The majority of what you write will probably be atrocious but see how much you have written and compare it with how long it would normally take you to write that much normally. If you already have a story or novel idea in mind you may find that what you have written is actually pretty good and just needs a little editing.
2. Flash fiction: Give yourself the task of writing a paragraph within a two minute time period. Write four paragraphs and see what story you have. For example write separate paragraphs for each of the following:
- a setting
- a character
- an action
- a dialogue
This is sufficient for fully rounded short story. It will probably only be 200-300 words in length, but when was the last time you wrote a short story in 10 minutes? Then try experimenting with it by changing the order of the paragraphs. Write a new story starting with a character, then dialogue, then action, then setting, play around and see how different structures affect the creative process.
3. Spend 10 minutes describing one of your favourite hobbies or interests and explain why you like it. Focus on writing for as much of the ten minutes as you can.
You will notice that these exercises all focus on writing quickly. Quality is something which can be polished and improved on with time, content cannot, you need to be able to write it before you can make it perfect. People who write a lot tend to produce higher quality prose than people who write only a little, largely because they spend a lot of time practising both the writing and the editing. This effectively serves to train them to write quality copy even in their first draft, but their focus is not on quality, it is writing the story as the first step to producing a final, publishable draft.
Motivation
Want to write but never get round to doing it? The chances are you aren’t motivated to write. There are good reason’s to be unmotivated, it requires time and energy, it is often solitary and for most there is little or no financial reward. If you are not writing and would like to be you need to find a reason to write.
You can work out what is stopping you from writing and come up to solutions to those problems. If you find writing to solitary and isolated – start writing with somebody. You could try writing independently and just discussing your work or you could even try writing collaboratively.
If you need a financial reward you can try setting yourself goals to make money from your writing – find publications that pay for creative writing, research what sort of writing they want and start writing specifically for those publications. Alternatively you can “pay” yourself for your writing by establishing a rewards system. If you complete a story or a piece of work by a certain deadline, you reward yourself by buying something you really want, or doing something you really want to do.
If you find that you don’t have time to write but would like to, you need to start looking at your priorities. How much do you really want to write? Why don’t you have the time or energy to write? What do you need to do to enable yourself to write?
If you do want to write regularly, you need to make writing regularly a priority and that may mean lowering the priority of other interests: TV or trivia night might be something you cut back on while writing.
Another important part to motivating yourself to write is having goals and knowing what you want. If you want to be a writer – what exactly does that mean to you? Do you need to write everyday to consider yourself a writer? Do you need to be publishing what you write to consider yourself a writer? When you know what you consider is necessary for you, you can decide on what aims and goals you have.
You may decide that as you have full time work, you want to write a novella a year. This would give you an ongoing goal which would fit in with your work timetable. You can then decide to spend a few hours each weekend writing. You might decide that you want to write a short story a month and might spend two evenings a week writing. When you have a clear aim of what you want to do, make sure you also have a deadline to keep – this helps reduce procrastination. When you do meet your deadlines and requirements, reward yourself for doing so. It helps keep you motivated and interested.
Direction
The other problem which writers have when suffering from writers’ block is essentially a lack of direction. You have the motivation to write, you have an idea or a character or an event you want to write about but you just don’t know what to write.
If you story lacks direction there are two main problems that you need to deal with. You may not have a sufficiently strong plot or your characters may not be sufficiently developed to drive the plot.
If you are having trouble developing the plot, focus on the setting and the characters. Work out the environment the characters are living in. Work out what they do as part of their daily lives in the location where they currently are. Then think about the characters, what is their background? What skills do they have? What habits, what friends, what interests do they have?
Work out the details for all the characters. Once you know the setting and the characters it will be much easier to find their need which then acts as the stimulus for the rest of the plot. Once you have a need and know the sort of people your characters are the plot will quickly fall into place and the characters will come across as being genuine, plot events will be plausible.
These are the three main problems people have with writers’ block. If you follow through each of these stages you will probably resolve many of the issues you have had.
There is a myriad of techniques which can be used to both enhance your creativity and overcome issues surrounding sabotage and writers block. For more information contact Peter.
© Peter Campbell, NLP Master Practitioner, www.cogniscientnlp.com.