Blockbuster Ten

Ten Things You Can Do to Bust Writer's Block

Break It Promise: Make this deal with yourself: if you write for the next thirty minutes, you can take thirty minutes off to do something fun. If thirty minutes seems too long, try fifteen or ten.

Celebrate: Throw yourself a Writer's Block party with your real-life people. Order in Chinese or Pizza. Ask everyone for suggestions on how to beat your block. Offer silly prizes for the best suggestions.

Change POV: Switch the POV to another character. Try telling your story from the point of view of other-than-protagonist characters, too, like a secondary, a hidden character, or the antagonist.

Clean: This is my favorite method for getting back on track with writing -- I tidy a room, vacuum the carpet, dust, or do some other housework for an hour. Cleaning always works out my frustrations and makes me feel better. By the time I'm finished I always feel like I've gotten rid of the internal cobwebs and dust bunnies, too.

End it: Stop writing whatever you're working on and write the very last chapter of that story.

Move On: Often a block is caused by a difficult-to-write scene. If that's the case, tag the place for the scene with a short reminder (i.e. [write fight scene between A and B]) and move on to the next.

Musical: Stop writing and listen to some inspiring music for fifteen minutes. Or take a break and put together a playlist for your story, and then listen to the piece you choose for the place where you stopped in the story and use the music to help you better visualize your scene.

Relocate: Take your writing and go somewhere else to write. Try different and new locations like a park, a library, or a cafe you've never visited. See where you're most productive and write there for a week.

Shutdown: If you can't write because your story seems trite, you've lost interest in it, you can't figure a way out of a plot problem, your characters have turned into wallpaper or any of a thousand other causes for your writer's block, why bother? Shelve the story and start a new one. You can always go back to the story you shelve if you want to have another go at it.

Timely: This is a way to start short and build on what you can do. Begin by writing five words. Take a short break. When you come back, write ten more words. Take a short break. When you come back, write twenty more words. Take a short break. Continue on by doubling your wordcount every time you come back from a break until you're back writing at your optimum rate.

Toes and Throws

Sometimes writers have to stop writing. It happens, usually when you have to deal with a problem or event that can be best described by adding the letters sh to the first word in this sentence. I did last year in between my eye surgeries, first because I was too blind to write, and then I was healing and still a bit fuzzy-sighted (and by the way, if you ever need someone to put drops in your eye, I'm your girl.) Once you do stop writing often it can be difficult to start again, especially after a long hiatus from the page.

I learned what to do from another surgery that got between me and the work many years ago. I lost most of the use of my left hand after having a tumor removed, and since I was left-handed I had the additional burden of relearning how to do everything right-handed. Anyone who has been forced to do this will tell you it's not much fun. Hand writing was out of the question until I learned to write as a righty, and my typing was restricted to whatever I could do with one-finger pecking. That's why I didn't write anything for almost a year. I even stopped thinking about writing so I could wrestle the larger issues.

When at last I did have a functioning right hand and semi-functioning left, I sat down to write. I remember how disconnected from the work I felt, too. It was still in my head, like a huge inner ocean of stories, but I hadn't gone for a swim in so long that simply eyeing it scared me. I decided to cautiously dip my toe back in the writing waters by composing a first page. I'd just start a story and see what happened. What happened was three hours of sitting there and sweating and fussing over every word until I'd produced about 200 of them. Which were collectively so bad that I immediately trashed them.

The next day I was back to square one with nothing to show for my first try. I considered writing another cautious toe-dip partial, and promised myself it was purely practice, and gave myself carte blanche to write crap in hopes that would jump start my mojo -- all the bargains writers make with themselves to get back on the horse. And I wrote another toe-dip page with some lukewarm setting and some action about as exciting as yawning, and trashed that, and started to seriously question myself.

On the third morning I sat in my writing space for a while staring at the keys. Desperation hovered, wanting to set in. Or maybe it was writer's block; I'm not sure. One thing I did know was that I couldn't dip my toe in to test the waters again because that wasn't working. Neither were the bargains and promises I'd made with/to myself. So I decided to hell with it, and defaulted to the last resort. No more toe-dipping and thinking about it and worrying. No more thinking about it, period. I'd throw myself in the water and write a novel. A fun novel. A novel for me and no one else.

Four months and 468 manuscript pages later I typed the last page of that novel, gave myself a week off, and then finally read it. The beginning was complete and utter crap, and the middle crawled more than it should have, and the twist at the end was more of a wrinkle, but it was a novel -- a finished novel. And the next one I wrote was better, and the one after that was much, much better. As for that lame, for-fun novel I never published or even showed anyone, it remains the most valuable story I've ever written. If I hadn't thrown myself into it, I know I would have quit writing altogether.

The process still works for me, too. Last year In the Leaves was my 2014 post eye-surgery throw story. Rain Lashed was a throw story after another, earlier eye surgery. After I broke my foot and cracked some ribs during a bad fall down the stairs back in 2003 writing Deimos threw me back into the work.

Whether you use toes, throws or something in between, maybe the most important thing you can do after taking a long break from writing is to write anything, really. Whether it's 1 page, or 468 of them, you're doing your job, and bottom line: writing is what makes you a writer.

Image Credits:

Toe dip: warrengoldswain
Leaping dolphin: vitaliy_sokol

Story Carding

Long before manga or anime there was Kamishibai, a form of Japanese storytelling with picture cards based on the same practice used by 12th century Buddhist monks who used picture scrolls to teach morality lessons. This is now a popular form of storytelling in schools on this side of the planet, and board versions of kamishibai are even employed by some corporations as a visual management tool.

Back in 2008 I came up with the idea to make character trading cards using Big Huge Labs photo trading card generator, and I've always been interested in cards like as a storytelling tool. If you take the kamishibai approach to creating cards for your story, and use a strong symbolic image, some titles and descriptive sentences, you could card every chapter like this:



Now to show you how that template works with a real story, here are two cards I've made for my NaNoWriMo 2014 novel:





I think this might work as well if not better than index cards, sticky notes or all the other ways we outline stories. You can also do these cards for scenes versus chapters. Also, you can use any card form you like; I just went with Big Huge Labs's card generator because it's easy and the results are attractive.

What do you think of the idea? Let me know in comments.

Catching Threads

Last week I finally started on my annual Spring project of making sachets for our drawers and closets. One nifty little helpful widget I picked up at this year's county quilt show is a thread catcher, which you can see there in the photo on the left (the white and black cup-like thing.) When you sew you are forever snipping threads, and having a little bin in which to deposit them prevents them from clinging to you, your project, your hair, your pincushion, your fabric, your rug, your sewing machine, being sewn back into your project, etc. The neat thing about this widget is that when I'm finished I can empty it and collapse it into the size of a Ring Ding, which also makes it very portable. It was so cool I bought a second one for a friend.

Would that we had such handy widgets for catching our story threads. Writers use everything from index cards and Post-It notes to whiteboards and outline trees to keep our threads mapped out, organized and contained, and still we drop them, lose them, forget about them and/or wake up at 2 a.m. in a panic after we send off the last round of revisions to our editor because we forgot about that thread we left dangling unfinished in chapter seventeen (I'm still really sorry about that, Adam.)

If you're into software solutions, excellent novel organizer services like Hiveword can help you keep track of your story threads (and it's still free, and there's nothing to download; you work online with it.) But let's say you want a low-tech solution that is simple and easy to update while you're working offline on your story -- this is why I invented PBW's Story Thread Catcher:



Okay, I know, it's just a blank writing pad. But you're going to turn it into a story thread catcher -- like this:



At the top of your writing pad, write Chapter One/Scene One or however you want to divvy up the work, and write a short line on each of the threads you start in this section (if you're a plotter, you can do this before you write the chapter; if you're a pantser, do this after you write the chapter.) This is your thread catcher section. Now on the bottom half of the page, make notes about any work you need to do on the threads in the next chapter (pantsers, if you want you can just write lalalala on this part.)

Tear off the bottom section of the page and remember to review it before or after you write the next chapter so you do or have done the thread work necessary. The work you do on the threads then becomes the entries for the top catcher section of the next page. Then all you do is repeat the process for each chapter. As you progress with your story, you will build up a flippable series of tops with your thread notes, so that's the catcher part:



See how simple? If you need to look back at a particular thread and how it went, all you have to do is flip through the top part. Keeping track of the threads is as simple as lettering or numbering them in sequence (and yes, you can add more threads as you go along, just remember to keep adding them to and tracking them on your subsequent thread notes.) When you finish your story, all you have to do is make sure you wrapped up each thread, and you do that by reading through your catcher section.

You're welcome.