It's a terrible thing. I just read this description of Writer's Block by one of my favorite authors, Diana Wynne Jones, and felt I should share it with the rest of you: "Well, it's a terrible condition. You . . . are lucky not to know what it's like. You haven't a thought in your head, or if you have, you can't somehow get it down on paper, or if you do manage to put something down, it goes small and boring and doesn't lead anywhere. And you panic because you can't earn any money, and that makes it worse. It can go on for years, too--" "It's like when they tell me in school, 'Make a drawing of ancient Britons,' and I can't because I'm not in a drawing mood." Diana Wynne Jones, Archer's Goon Exactly! Though I'm not altogether sure about that ancient Britons thing . . . . But only Mrs. Jones could so aptly describe the one great peril that writers of all shapes, sizes, and genres dread: Writer's Block. And the really terrible thing is that the moment you think you have finally broken the cycle, that you know how to avoid this fate, that you have at last achieved some great height of writerliness beyond the lot of mere mortals that makes you immune to this deadly, inspiration-killing disease, that's when you are most susceptible. I am currently suffering from Writer's Block. It's not even about a lack of ideas. Some people make the mistake of thinking that this problem arises from not knowing what to do next in the story, a lack of plotting or character or some such literary device as all that. Perhaps this is true for some writers out there. Personally, I find it to be a more subtle malady than that. For me, it's almost never a lack of ideas. Take my current position, for example. I am 30,000 words into my most recent novel after a creative burst of about 18,000 words in five days, which is something of a record for me. I was fairly breezing along, watching the story take shape almost of its own accord under my fingers, as though the words were just begging to be written, leaping up and squeaking, "Oooh! Oooh! Me! Me! Me!" as it were. And now I'm come to the first Pivotal Plot Twist. It's a great scene, really. In my head, I have a thousand ideas for it. It's full of action, pathos, drama, terror. It's a moment when characters reveal their true colors. It's a scene that changes the whole course of the rest of the book, galvanizing the plot into full running motion. The ideas are fairly boiling over with interest and portent. What I'm lacking is . . . the feel. The feel is a lot more difficult to manage than ideas. It's like inspiration, perhaps actually is inspiration. It's when you know deep down inside that you have more than the bare-bones string of storyline, but that the entire woven braid is there and ready. It's when the ideas become more than ideas but take on their own reality in a flesh-and-blood scene that you can sink your teeth into, if you'll pardon a rather gruesome analogy. The feel of a scene isn't something you can fake. Either it's there or it's not. If it's not there, it's like Diana Wynne Jones says: your ideas, when penned out, are small. Colorless. Lifeless little things that are almost embarrassing to look at. And you can poke them and prod them all you like, rewriting them into the ground, and they're still nothing more than feeble little things that lead nowhere. Outlines cannot save you at this point. Not that outlines aren't important. They certainly are, as a kind of road map. But outlines are not stories, and ideas scribbled down in chronological order are never a substitute for full-bodied storytelling. Now there are many techniques that writers will utilize to try to break the power of the Writer's Block on their lives. Some of them are as follows: 1. Writers skip ahead and will try to write a "more interesting" scene if they find themselves bogged down in one spot. While this may work for some writers (everyone uses a different process), this never, but never works for me. I believe that a story needs to be told a complete and whole entity. Each scene should flow naturally into the next, events building on top of each other to create the complete picture, like layers in a painting. (Pardon another analogy: when you're painting, you can't skip ahead to the fifth layer if you haven't yet applied the third. The end). If you begin hopping about your scenes, you end up with a disjointed, episodic creation and a cast of characters who really don't know who they are or what's going on because huge chunks of their lives aren't even written yet. 2. The "random words or phrases" technique is another popular one. Writers will take a randomly interesting word or phrase and, leaving their poor suffering work-in-progress on the sidelines, go on and write a short story or poem or rambling paragraph about this randomly interesting word or phrase. Again, not a technique that works for me. Sure, maybe I can get on a rambling flow of thought and words will spew from my pen. But generally (not in every case, but in the majority of cases) this doesn't do a blessed thing for the suffering work-in-progress, which doesn't need a wordy ode to "The Midnight Sun Behind the Wellspring of the Other Side of Nothingness." It needs a scene, a new scene which is as yet unwritten. 3. Some writer's interview their characters in an attempt to get to know them better. Again, for some perhaps this works. For me, I must again insist that my characters don't need interviews. My characters need to a new scene, and no amount of interviewing them on what they have in the glove compartment of their cars or what their great aunt's second cousin's maiden name was and why, is going to progress the work-in-progress one jot. 4. I'm running out of popular writer's block avoidance methods, but this is the last one I can think of. "Try working on something else." How many ways can you say, 'Doomsday'? Of course there are all kinds of a writers out there, as many kinds of writers as there are kinds of people. But for yours truly, if I move on to writing something else, that usually spells a death sentence for my current work-in-progress. It means removing myself from that story, those characters, creating a distance even greater than the writer's block itself. It means, in short, giving up. Not that I won't return to the story later on . . . in most cases, I do at least open it up again. But if I have left it and moved on to write something else for a while, I am a different person, a different writer by the time I return to the former project. And the former project, even if taken up and completed, will never be the book that it started out to be. Most of the time, it simply isn't finished. All that to say, I have yet to find a cure to Writer's Block that works for me. Other than time. If I wait (hopefully not for too long because that can be just as bad as method #4 up there), almost always the feeling returns to me eventually. It's simply not something I can force, no matter how I want to. But when it comes, oh! How sweet it is! And all the frustrations of that dread Writer's Block are forgotten for the time being in the joys of being a storyteller once more with a story I want to tell, mostly because it's a story that I want to read. In the meantime, this is the best advice I can give to myself: Wait. Pray. Read good books or passages from good books. Let the story percolate, but try not to focus on it too much. And try to remember, as you're waiting for that inspiration to return, that it DOESN'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT the first time around. All it needs is a little life. _____ Some years ago “Jackie boy, wake up!” “Don’t call me that.” “She’s at it again!” Some years ago, when I was but a young man “Oh please. Don’t tell me I’m going to have to listen to you Monologue this entire Book.” “Hey, I think I sound pretty good. When I was but a young man—” “And you’re so old now?” “Shut up.” Some years ago, when I was but a young man, I knew mine was to be a life fraught with destiny. “What’s fraught mean?” “Burdened.” “Oh. I’m not sure I like that.” Mine was to be a life fraught with destiny. It was foretold to my parents, my noble father the shoemaker and my beautiful mother, who was secretly the daughter of a humbled nobleman whose seat of power was stolen from him by my wicked uncle “My father’s an orthodontist.” “Not anymore.” “And my uncle Fred’s a shoemaker, and he’s kinda fun, knows the best jokes. He told this one, heheheh, did you ever hear the one about the mathematicians at the wedding? No, sorry, it was the three blonde philosophers at the funeral—” “Hush up and Monologue, Hero.” “Yeah, yeah, whatever, no sense of humor . . . .” . . . stolen from him by my wicked uncle. The old hag who was midwife at my birth took one look at my face and said “What’s a midwife? Some sort of lesser-variety wife? Like the mid-grade versus the superior?” “I’m not answering that. I’m not even thinking about answering that.” “But I—” “Stanhope!” The old hag who was midwife at my birth took one look at my face and said Jack looked at Stanhope. Stanhope looked at Jack. Took one look at my face and said “Yes?” . . . and said . . . . “What’d she say, Stanhope?” . . . and said . . . . “Out with it, man! What did the hag say?” “Don’t rush me, I’m getting there!” . . . and said . . . . STUPID! STUPID! STUPID! I’LL NEVER BE A WRITER!!1!! I’M AWFUL! I HATE THIS !1!!1! “That’s not very literary, Stanhope.” “Heck, I can’t help what old hags say.” They waited, looking at each other. Jack raised his eyebrows. “Well?” “Uh . . . you don’t suppose she’s hit Writer’s Block, do you?” | 
