Writer's block, part 3

Part 3 in this series will go more in depth about difficult cases of writer’s block that just won’t budge. If you’ve read and attempted the suggestions in the Part 2 post and still freeze up when you confront a blank page, this post is for you. Sure, I’m chugging away in my writing pretty well now, but writer’s block used to plague me like—well, like the plague. A lot of the suggestions I mentioned last week didn’t work for me—until I started working with the things I’m going to share today.

Even though you may not be able to write right now, you can still step back and consider why. And if you’ve read the previous two posts on writer’s block, you hopefully agree by now that thinking, in the sense of thinking and worrying about your writing before you actually write (and, of course, worrying about the quality of your writing as you write), can be a huge enemy. And I’m guessing you knew that before you found this blog. But it’s one thing to say, “Just don’t think about it! Everything will be fine!” and another thing to actually be able to make that not-thinking work.

One way I’ve learned to make it work is from Ekhart Tolle’s Practicing the Power of Now. It’s a great little book that’s more about life in general than about writing in particular, but one thing he talks about is watching the thinker. Basically, this means that instead of identifying with every thought you have (“My writing is crap! It can never get better! I’ll never write anything better than a grocery list ever again!”), you observe them, as if some other, very neurotic person were blurting them out. This gives you a bit of mental quiet and some much-needed distance from whatever is freaking you out. It also allows you to practice detachment and mindfulness—being aware of what you’re thinking and feeling without getting stuck in it.

Another very helpful book, which I’m currently rereading (and reworking, for those of you who have read it), is Julia Cameron’s The Artist's Way. She has a lot of great strategies for getting unblocked, and one of the most well known is the morning pages. Morning pages are quite simple: in the morning, every morning, handwrite three pages of whatever comes to mind. It’s like meditation; you’re not looking for anything fancy or creative, just an awareness of what you’re thinking. It’s a great way to get rid of the fear of writing crap because, hey, you’re supposed to write crap every day! You’re putting it on your schedule! It may sound counterintuitive if you’ve never tried it before, but this can really get rid of any anxiety you have about “bad” writing.

Another thing I like to do is brainstorm without condemnation, without trying to discover which ideas are “good” or “bad.” (In this mindset, these words best belong in quotation marks.) At times when I feel like I’m the world’s worst/slowest/stupidest/whatever-est writer, I don’t even call it writing. I call it planning (creating bullet points for the plot of a chapter or story I’m working on), freewriting (letting whatever comes out about my story just get onto the page), or even tinkering. This process is much more playful than anything I might be able to write when the voice of writer’s block is telling me it’s all crap—and it produces the raw material I can fashion into a polished, revised work later on. This process has often been compared to how a potter gathers clay. You don’t blame the potter for assembling her materials first, nor do you blame the clay for not being a finished sculpture already. This accepting attitude allows you a lot more mental clarity and energy to create something. Even if you think this something is terrible, it’s much better than nothing. It’s your clay—and you get to reshape it in whatever way you like.