The varied nature of blockage
Every writer gets writer’s block, but that is a label that covers a lot of things, ranging from a creative dry spell to the release of a new Fallout DLC. Listed below are my types of block and how I deal with them.
Creative loss: This is when my drive to write shuts off, usually for no reason. It’s gone. Nope, no interest at all. This is the time I do in-depth research, troll Wikipedia, prepper, and conspiracy forums looking for ideas. The drive will come back on its own; and in the meantime I’ll play Skyrim with a character restricted to daggers and bows.
Story arc death: This one stalled Zerk for two years, among other projects. I’m chugging along cranking out solid rough draft, and then BLAM: I realize the the plot I have won’t work. There I am with 30,000 words and absolutely no idea where to go with it. All I can do is shelve the project and wait for an idea to hit, which is tough because it has to be an idea that will build off the original foundation. To this end I watch movies, documentaries (especially those I don’t agree with or which cover topics I am not interested in; Zerk was solved while watching a Pivot doc about failing schools), and stuff on NatGeo. You never know when inspiration will hit. Watching or reading within the selected genre helps to get me in the right frame , too.
Scene stall: This is where I am chugging along, the background, characters, and overall plot are meshing within the tolerances of rough draft standards. I’m cooking along, the plot plan notes “H wins fight in bar, captures map” (H = hero, my shorthand. Because protagonist takes too long) and for some reason I cannot cannot come up with a bar fight (or ambush, argument, research scene, whatever). Maybe 400-500 words, I know what has to happen (in overview), but for some reason I just cannot get the scene going. When that happens I usually proofread and edit (the eternal bane of indie writers: fixing the typos) until I can figure out a way to make it work. Usually once I get a paragragh in I’m OK, but other that first paragraph is rough.
New Fallout, Borderlands, Skyrim, Seven days to Die, or Far Cry material: Just play it out. There’s no getting past it.
