Category Archives: Writer’s Block

Procrastinate to be Prolific?

Been meaning to blog about this, but kept putting it off. This article by Loizos Heracleous and David Robson cites studies claiming procrastination can benefit creativity.

The authors quote Agatha Christie as saying she often thought of story ideas while bathing. I suspect many writers have experienced a similar phenomenon. You’re writing and get stuck. You take a break and turn to some dull activity, such as mowing the lawn, cleaning the house, showering, etc., and Bang! The solution comes to mind. Often you don’t even realize you were thinking about it.

The article discusses several studies that bear this out. Researchers found that taking a break from a creative task and performing a different, humdrum task allowed participants to return to the creative task and perform better. Oddly, those that rested instead of working on a humdrum task did not do as well.

Odd that the human mind works this way. I’ve blogged before about how weird that is. You could spend time puzzling about it or analyzing this brain quirk, but perhaps your time’s better spent accepting it and using it to your advantage. When the words won’t spill out, back away and pursue some mundane chore for a while.

However, I urge you not to draw the wrong conclusion from this discussion. You’re thinking, “Well, if procrastination works that well, I’ll spend years putting off writing and end up a best-selling author.”

Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. In fact, I wish the article hadn’t use the term ‘procrastinate’ at all. The word means to postpone, to delay, like when you have homework due and you watch YouTube videos instead.

We’re talking about something different here. When you get stuck while writing and choose to do gardening instead, you’re not really postponing anything. You’re still writing in the sense that your brain is thinking of creative solutions.

To paraphrase the math genius, Yogi Berra—writing is 90% mental; the other half is physical. Your body may have walked away from the keyboard, but your brain still writes.

Put another way, if you aim to be a prolific writer, you must write a lot. But not all writing time involves stringing words together. An observer might think you’re washing dishes, but you’re really stringing ideas together. Just tell that observer you’re not procrastinating, you’re writing in your mind, just like—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 6, 2023Permalink

6 Tricks to Keep You Writing

Some time ago, you thought of a great idea for a story and started writing. Today, you can’t bring yourself to work on it any more. You’re not feeling the urge. You lost enthusiasm.

As you look back over it, you realize your writing sucks. You can’t bear to go on with it. You’ve come to believe it’s a waste of time.

You’re wondering what happened. How could you have been so fired up about the idea of the story, and so disgusted with the reality of it? Where did all that fervor, that passion, go? How do you get it back?

One option—the easiest one—is to give up. Admit defeat. Abandon the story and do other things with your time. I’ve explored that possibility before. Most often, that’s not the answer. You might be denying the world a good story, a salvageable one.

Maybe, if you search hard enough, or wait long enough, your motivation will return. Nah. As author Chuck Wendig explains in this post, nobody’s going to mail you some motivation, gift you some get-up-and-go, or present you a package of passion.

You have to rekindle that fire inside yourself, by yourself. Sorry. There’s no other way.

I know some techniques for doing that. Maybe one or more of the following will work for you:

  1. Reward. Give yourself small rewards for producing set amounts of writing. Grant yourself the reward only for output, not time spent. Note: food is not an ideal reward.
  2. Deadline. If you’re the type who works best under the pressure of time, create that pressure. Invent a deadline date and make it as real as you can—a visible calendar with the date circled in red. Devise a suitable (painless) penalty for missing the deadline, and a suitable reward for meeting it.
  3. Organize. If writing the story now seems intimidating and overwhelming, break it down into manageable parts. Finishing these small tasks will give you a sense of accomplishment and show progress toward the overall goal.
  4. Re-evaluate. Perhaps you’ve assumed you’d achieve brilliant prose in your first draft. Lower those expectations. Accept that this story might require several pass-throughs, each draft improving the story a little. The world won’t see your sausage-making process, only the final product.
  5. Remember. Think back to the origin of the story. Get back in that frame of mind. Recall why you felt so good about it then. Maybe the story needs some tweaking, some slight adjustments, from your original thoughts.
  6. Envision. Imagine a near future with your story finished, published, and succeeding. However you define ‘success,’ visualize an outsized amount—readers clamoring for your autograph, talk show hosts eager to interview you, vast royalties pouring into your savings account, whatever. Warning—don’t fall so much in love with this fantasy that you set yourself up for disappointment.

One or more of those techniques might help you fall back in love with your story, at least enough to finish writing it.

Take it from someone who’s used all six of those tricks at some point, none other than—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 12, 2022Permalink

6 (or 7?) Secrets to Being a Prolific Writer

Would you like to write as many books (over 500) as Dr. Isaac Asimov? Let’s find out how he did it.

Writer Charles Chu studied Asimov’s autobiographies and distilled six habits Asimov developed and used to write so many enjoyable books. Below is my summary of that list, put in my own words. I’ve added a seventh bonus habit as well.

  1. Read to Learn. Don’t stop educating yourself, even though you’ve finished formal school. Take Mark Twain seriously, and “never let school interfere with your education.” Read a lot, and on many different topics. You never know what will spark your muse.
  2. Bypass Writer’s Block. Sometimes you might get stuck, either because you don’t know what to write next, or because you’ve been over and over your story so many times you can’t stand it anymore. When that happened to Asimov, he shifted to a different writing project. When you return to the project that gave you writers block, you’ll approach it with a fresh perspective, and you may find you’re now ready to finish it.
  3. Ignore the Mental Antibodies. Within you dwell antibodies whose job is to identify, attack, and eliminate bacteria and viruses. You have mental antibodies, too, and they ‘protect’ you from ideas that are different or scary, notions that might get criticized by readers. This causes insecurities and fears. These antibodies can turn you into a perfectionist, forever editing and never submitting, or cause you to abandon a writing project altogether. Asimov never became a perfectionist. Aware of the danger of mental antibodies, he just forged ahead and wrote.
  4. Lower Your Bar. As mentioned, Asimov wasn’t a perfectionist. He loved to quote Robert Heinlein’s phrase, “They don’t want it good. They want it Wednesday.” Asimov developed confidence, then pride, in his writing. (Perhaps a bit beyond pride.) His self-assurance enabled him to rise above doubts, to avoid over-editing. Obviously, this is a learned skill. Don’t put trashy first drafts into the marketplace and expect them to sell.
  5. Don’t Take Breaks. Maybe your first story failed to sell, and you think it will help your writing if you take some time off. Or maybe your story did very well, and you feel you deserve to rest on your laurels awhile. Asimov never did that. He kept working, always concentrating on the Work in Progress (WIP) rather than the work most recently published.
  6. Stuck for an Idea? Think Harder. New writers and non-writers often ask authors where they get their ideas. Asimov got asked too, and his answer was, “by thinking and thinking and thinking till I’m ready to kill myself…Did you ever think it was easy to get a good idea?” Note the adjective ‘good.’ Like most people, he probably got many ideas to write about, but found a low percentage worthy of his time. More thought generally solved that problem for him.

Charles Chu ended his list at six, but hinted at a seventh Asimov habit for being a prolific writer, so I’ll state it outright:

  1. Write Every Day. Maybe you can’t equal Asimov’s work schedule—eight hours a day, seven days a week. But if you adopt the previous six habits, you’ll achieve a reproducible process where more time writing results in more publishable output.

Perhaps you won’t write 500 books, but there are degrees of prolificness, so you could end up further to the right on that spectrum than you expected. Thanks to the wisdom of Isaac Asimov, that’s the aim of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

March 13, 2022Permalink

3 States of Writing Flow

Fellow author Andrew Gudgel wrote a great blogpost on December 19, 2019 regarding writing, and I’d like to expand on it.

His post is titled “Water, Molasses, Glass” and you may have to scroll down to get to it. He compares writing to the densities of three substances—water, molasses, and glass.

Sometimes writing comes easily and flows like water. Other times it’s more difficult and flows like thick molasses. What about glass? Well, that’s probably a bad example, since it’s a solid and doesn’t flow at all. The common belief that it’s a slow-moving liquid is false.

Water, Molasses, and Tar

A better third substance would be tar, or pitch. That is a slow-flowing (highly viscous) liquid. Very patient researchers at the University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia) have been watching pitch pour from a funnel since 1930. In those ninety years, nine drops have fallen. Nine drops. Rather a slow way to resurface your driveway.

Let’s get back to the writing comparison.

Water. When writing flows like water, life is good. You know what’s coming next, and nothing’s slowing you down. Without effort, you’re churning out words in a steady stream. People have studied this state of mind and call it ‘Flow.’ I blogged about this phenomenon here. It’s great while it lasts, but it always ends at some point. While you’re in that zone, just go for it.

Molasses. Here’s where writing is harder. You’ve got to force the words out. There are long stretches where you’re just thinking and not producing prose at all. You consider doing something more fun, like, say, cleaning the garage. When in this mental state, I suggest a few strategies:

  1. First, try to recall why you started this writing project in the first place. Something made you want to write this story, and you were enthused about it then. Try to recapture that passion.
  2. Second, write an outline, or revisit the one you previously wrote. Jot down where you think the story is going. Or, since you’re stuck for words, create a mind-map of all the possible alternatives for the part you’re stuck on. It could be different plot paths, different scene descriptions, possible character types, or whatever.
  3. Third, consider writing something else for a while. Trust that your subconscious, your muse, will work on the original problem and come up with a solution.

Tar. At a drop each decade, this is truly writer’s block. I’ve written about writer’s block before, both the diagnosis and the cures. There are several things that might be causing your writer’s block, and you have to pick the right cure for your particular cause.

May your words always flow like water and your rejections and negative reviews flow like tar. That’s the writing wish for you from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 16, 2020Permalink

Emotional Roller-coaster

As you and the story you’re writing go through time together, do you find yourself on the same type of emotional roller-coaster as with a personal relationship? Do you feel elated by positive events and dejected by negative ones? I’ve been through the process enough to detect a repeatable pattern. Maybe it will be the same for you.

Let’s follow through as I experience the highs and lows of writing a story and getting it published. This is my relationship with a single story, so the line will overlap with other stories in various stages.

Emotional RollercoasterGetting a story idea is enjoyable, having it mature in my mind while I imagine the possibilities, the characters, the plotline, the settings, and some of the dramatic scenes. It’s a good feeling to go through that, because that imaginary, unwritten story is as good as it’s ever going to be. Once the reality starts and I put words down, the story never reaches the exalted heights of perfection that it achieved when just a dream.

Still, putting words down has a gratification all its own. I feel I’m making progress, producing product, assembling widgets on my keyboard / word / sentence / paragraph assembly line.

Until I get stuck with writer’s block. Here I mean the minor writer’s block I’ve described before, where I can’t get out of a plot hole, or I need a character to act contrary to his or her motivations, etc. Although temporary, this is a real downer. I don’t always experience this, (as shown by the reddish line) but there’s usually some drop-off in enthusiasm as the glow of the original idea fades a bit.

Reaching THE END of the first draft is a definite up-tic in satisfaction for me. The mad rush of getting words down is over. It’s good to know I can start the reviewing-editing-improving phase.

For simplicity, my graph only shows two drafts, but there may be more, with minor wave crests for completing each one. I get to the highest emotional state so far when I consider the story done and submit it for publication. “Here, Dear Editor, this is my newborn! Don’t you love it as much as I do?”

That emotional high fades, as they all do, while waiting for a response. Usually I’ve begun another story by then, so I get an overlap with a similar-looking graph displaced in time.

My graph depicts two paths here, one showing a rejection. Despite my earlier advice to look at rejections positively, I still find that hard to do. Rejections stink. Maybe not as much now as my first one, but still…

An acceptance of a story is a very high emotional state, especially the first time. It’s time to celebrate, indulge, and surrender to the grandeur and magnificence of me.

No one can maintain a very high or very low state forever, so I do descend from the grand summit as I get through the rewrites and signing of the contract, though these are not unpleasant.

The launch of a story is another sublime pinnacle of emotional ecstasy, and that’s no hyperbole. “For all human history, readers have awaited a story like this, and today, I, yes I, grant your wish and launch this masterpiece, this seminal work of ultimate prose, so you may purchase and read it. You’re quite welcome.”

After the story is launched, you’ll get occasional uplifting moments, such as favorable reviews, or book signings, etc. These are never quite as exciting as acceptance or launching, but they’re gratifying anyway.

I’ve not gotten through all these stages with a novel yet, but I suppose a novel’s graph is longer in time, and has many more ups and downs than that of a short story.

Also, your mileage may vary such that your graph looks quite different from mine. Leave me a comment and let me know about the emotional stages of your writing experience.

Remember, when on a roller-coaster (emotional or state fair-type), it sometimes helps to raise your hands in the air and scream. Whee! Here goes—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 26, 2014Permalink

Writing the Tough Scenes

Blank Screen BluesSometimes, you need a certain scene for your story, but you just can’t write it. Has that happened to you? Something about the scene gives you the Blank Screen Blues. Words won’t flow. The idea of writing the scene repels you. You invent excuses not to write.

Most likely the problem is one of the following kinds:

1. There’s a ‘story problem’ where the plot isn’t fitting together, or you need a character to do something that character wouldn’t do, or the scene’s setting is wrong.

2. The scene involves a subject or action you find disgusting or abhorrent.

            Story Problem

This blog post provides a good five step process for overcoming ‘story problems’ that keep you from writing a scene. Here are the steps in brief, though you should read author Rocky Cole’s more detailed descriptions:

1. Determine why you need the scene.

2. Decide what characters are in the scene and what they want.

3. Decide on a location and time for scene.

4. Figure out how the scene starts and ends.

5. Write the dialogue first, then fill in the rest.

            Distasteful Topic

There are certain topics that are difficult to write about. These vary from writer to writer, of course, but can include abuse, alcoholism, death, rape, sex, suicide, violence of other kinds, etc. Some writers find it easier to write about violence to a human than to certain animals.

Sometimes the act depicted in the scene is necessary to the overall story, so you know it’s coming up as you write along. You figure you’ll be okay when you get there, but then comes the day to write that scene and it’s just not happening. You can’t bear to put the words down.

You might be tempted to take the scene offstage. That is, don’t write it, but continue with the following scenes, where the characters recover from or react to an event that happened during an interval between the last scene and this one. You figure that, with enough context, the reader will fill in the gap.

According to the advice offered on this site, that’s a bad idea. The whole idea of fiction, the thing that keeps it interesting to readers, is the notion of characters in conflict. If you take the conflict offstage, you’re keeping your reader from seeing how your protagonist reacts to real difficulties.

I agree with this. Say you can’t seem to write the fight scene where your hero faces the villain. In a way, your own bravery is in question, more so than that of your hero. You need to face your villain, the unwritten scene itself.

Commenters on a Nashville Writers Meetup forum agree too, and recommend just buckling down and using the emotions you’re feeling to write the scene. One quotes novelist Sarah Schulman as saying “If it doesn’t hurt, you aren’t doing it right.”

Along with other blog posts on the subject, this one by author Kelly Heckart emphasizes the need for you to force yourself to do what’s right for the story.

In this forum site, one contributor suggests you might be focusing on your own emotions, your own reaction to a disagreeable act. Instead, concentrate on the reactions and emotions of your characters; that might give enough detachment to allow you to write the scene.

Speaking of detachment, author Linda Govik recommends that you set the whole story aside for awhile, even a year. You might find it easier after that time to write that troublesome scene.

Yet another way to achieve the necessary detachment is offered by the author of this post who recommends thorough research of the disagreeable topic as a way to gain more comfort with the notion of writing about it.

You know what they say: “when the writing gets tough, the tough get writing.” Well, maybe they don’t say it, but I’ve heard it said by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

June 1, 2014Permalink

Got a Good Case of Writer’s Block?

Writer’s Block gets a lot of bad press.  Authors fear it.  It’s called an occupational hazard.  People write about how to avoid it and how to get unblocked, and I’m one of those who’s written posts like that (here and here).

Could it be that Writer’s Block (WB) might really be a good thing?

Writers block on a pedestalToday I’ll try finding some positive aspects of WB.  I’ll put it on a pedestal and let it shine a bit.

I came across this brief quote from author Gay Talese and it caused me to look at WB in a different light.  He says it’s a signal we’re not ready to write at our best; it’s an inner voice that is doing us a favor by holding us back.

True, WB is an interruption in your production of words, and you will earn no sales from future works until production resumes.  But Talese is saying there are worse things, such as creating stories of inferior quality.  At best, those low-grade stories won’t get published.  At worst, they will, and your reputation as an author will suffer.

Perhaps, then, you should think of WB as an opportunity.  It’s the stranger who grabs you by the shoulder while you’re hacking your way through the forest with your machete and says, “There’s quicksand, and a hungry bear, and a steep cliff that way, Mate.”  Then he vanishes somewhere into the foliage.

It’s decision time for you.  You could ignore him and continue hacking.  Or you could consult your map and compass and discover he is right.  You were going the wrong direction.  The lost city of gold lies that way.

Note: this mysterious guide only detained you.  He didn’t point out the right way, let alone lead you straight to El Dorado.  Writer’s Block by itself doesn’t get your story going aright.  It only stays you from going awry.  It’s up to you to figure out the proper path.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying WB is something to seek out or strive for.  It’s best not to be hacking your way toward the quicksand in the first place.  It’s just comforting to know that if you are headed for trouble, some strange entity, some being from your unconscious mind, may seize your shoulder before you’ve gone too far.

Maybe changing the name will cause us to think of it in a different light.  Writer’s Block sounds dreadful, like some career-stalling or hobby-killing disease. Perhaps Writer’s Pause or something like that would be better.  If you can think of a more positive term for Writer’s Block, let me know by leaving a comment.

Got you to look at it differently, didn’t I?  You’re welcome.  Don’t worry; I’ve already thought of a way you can express your gratitude.  If you do get a good case of Writer’s Block, and it causes you to rethink your story, and a publisher gives you a million dollar advance, it would be only right for you to mail a modest but significant check to—

                                                      Poseidon’s Scribe

January 19, 2014Permalink