Battling Writer's Block

The bane of any writer's existence, of course, is that dreaded moment when she sits down to the keyboard or with that pad and paper and nothing comes. The reasons for writer's block vary, from deadline pressure or fear of failure, to a problem with your scene or a just plain harried lifestyle that clutters up your ability to be creative. How, then, does one work through this phase and get back to the business of writing again? There are several suggestions I can make that might jumpstart the process for you (though these are made with the mandatory disclaimer that not every suggestion may work for you?experiment a little to see what triggers your creativity the best).

One suggestion I can make would be to stop and find a half hour of quiet time to contemplate that scene or your manuscript in general. Sometimes this kind of brainstorming can be useful in gaining perspective on what you're doing. Perhaps you're stalled in your writing because you've just made your hero act out of character in order to keep your plot moving in the direction you'd like it to go in. Or perhaps you've written a scene of narrative with information that really would be better served to be included as part of a dialogue. If it is a hang-up like this that's blocking your ability to continue writing, then hashing through it in your mind can often work wonders for finding the problem and coming up with some solutions for it.

Another suggestion would be to engage in deep character writing - the kind that requires you to pretend to be your character and write in the first person as you talk about what is happening in "your" life. Sometimes it helps to write about the scene at hand, or maybe the plot as a whole - or even to develop a running conversation with yourself, almost like a diary entry, about whatever seems most important at the moment. But remember that you must always maintain that persona of your character; you are no long Jane Smith, romance author, you are your character, whether it be the hero, heroine, or villain. Oftentimes if you engage in this kind of exercise, the problem unknots itself and you can see where to go next.

My final suggestion at this point may take some time to develop, but it really does work (as I will attest to using it myself on a regular basis, even when I'm not feeling stuck!). It would be to find a particularly evocative (to you) piece of music and play it whenever you are doing anything connected with writing your story. It's tied to the "Pavlov's Dogs" concept: if your brain becomes accustomed to being creative when you hear the strains of a particular song or album, it will automatically "turn on" anytime you hear that tune. I've plotted most of my books this way, just randomly listening to music I think might be a "fit" for a given book, and then, once I find a song or group of songs I really like, staying with them as I plot out the book idea and begin writing. Once I'm on a roll, I stop listening as much, knowing that, if I come to a sticking point, I can just slide that CD in, listen, and feel my mind open up, miraculously, to some idea or characterization I hadn't allowed myself to conceive of before.

So next time you're confronted with a bad case of writer's block, try one or all of these methods to "un-stick" your creativity - they really can work!

Back to Writing Advice main page