How to smash writer’s block
Do you believe in writer’s block?
A very common question from new writers (and some that have been around the block) is: do I believe in writer’s block?
My answer is always: I don’t know.
There are so many famous stories of this strange and crippling problem that it would be silly for me to dismiss it outright. Our favorite writers (Ralph Ellison, Stephen King, George R.R. Martin) claim to have been struck down by this thing. Why wouldn’t I believe in it?
Well, mostly because it’s never happened to me. I don’t think I’m special in this regard, just lucky. I’ve studied all of the information I could find about writer’s block striking the greats and I’ve come to a few ideas about what it is, how it works, and what we can do about it.
What is writer’s block?
This is simple: the inability to write despite the desire to do so. Or, that’s the most common form. There’s another type, Chuck Kinder as chronicled by Michael Chabon being among the more famous for this variety, of the inability to stop writing despite the desire to do so. Writer’s block doesn’t just have to be a block on making words it can also be a block on the ability to stop making words. Either way, having a blank page or innumerable fully scribbled pages results in the same thing: a big nothing.
How does writer’s block work?
There are two phases of writer’s block, or so it appears.
The first phase of writer’s block is when someone is just starting out as a writer. They’re new, everything is hard, hard things are sometimes boring, and it’s really hard to do boring things, so the words don’t come. What appears to be writer’s block might just be the pain of getting better. These people should just stick with working and wait for the breakthrough to come.
For the second phase of writer’s block, I really like the analogy of the athlete, particularly the marathon runner, to describe how I’ve come to believe this phase works.
We all need a particular amount of training to be "fit" enough to write. The way we train is to sit in the chair and jam words out on the keyboard. Once we're "fit" we need to maintain that through repeated exposure. The problem is, just like physical fitness, the better we are the more it hurts.
The same is true of professional marathoners. Ask any of them, they don't have it easier than people coming off the couch to run a marathon. A professional’s capacity is so high that they can run speeds at exponential factors to the unfit, amateur runner but the pain is the same.
It might be that the pain of fitness is too much for a lot of people to bear. It sounds weird but it’s a common for both athletes and writers to “choke.” The second phase of writer’s block is a sign of competency and in that way, it signals a good thing. I have a few exercises that might help someone suffering from this version.
What can we do about writer’s block?
Using a concept called repeated exposure, I’ve come up with daily methods to stay unblocked.
It’s actually less boring and technical than it sounds. First, repeated exposure, is just a fancy word for practice. What I’ve done with my practice is to figure out what’s most important to make stories and developed a way to build those on each other.
I use a three-day cycle. On day one I write down three premises using a prompt of “what would happen if…?” Day two, I take those three premises and turn them each into loglines. A logline is a one or two sentence summary of your story that not only conveys your premise, but also gives emotional insight into the story as a whole. On the third day I take those loglines and turn them into opening sentences for the story that they summarize.
Then I repeat. Every. Damn. Day.
Doing this cycle not only gives me more ideas, loglines, and openers then I could possibly ever write, it also keeps me very sharp in my ability to generate stories. I never feel stuck, crushed, or blocked.
I guess the true antidote to writer’s block is to make sure you never get it.
