It’s Knower’s Block, not Writer’s Block

Obviously in my humble opinion.

I’ve been writing for ten years, I stumbled on that aphorism above by myself. Now knowing more of the world, and all the other obvious sources that have quoted similar ideas and beliefs, looking at Seth Godinor the ole Morning Pages from Julia Cameron. I see how global the idea is, but it’s no less important to realise it within oneself.

Knower’s Block. Not, Writer’s Block.

So what do I mean?

I guess it’s an amalgamation of many ideas. Like Seth Godin’s Talker’s Block, and the Morning Pages, it’s a confidence builder. In my opinion.

Obviously some writer’s are battling with confidence issues and the writing part isn’t necessarily a block in the ability to writer or convey a story, it’s a lack of confidence in expressing oneself. That is fine too. It’s a challenge to overcome, but one no less impossible because of it’s existence.

How I approached Writer’s Block was like this: I didn’t want to have it. I was gonna be pro. I was gonna write. I hated the story of “I stare at a blank page for eight hours and blah”. I thought it was fluff. I thought it was BS. And in a way it is, it’s also expressing that maybe in that eight hours pages got written and then deleted too.

But to work against this, I used the belief of both the writer’s mentioned above (unknowingly), and created my own shield against the cursed WB.

It came from stream of conscious writing. For five minutes straight I wrote everything that came to mind. Whether it was a story, journalling, shopping lists, or just words to keep listing. The thing is once a minute, five, ten, was up. I wanted to do more. Because I’d proved that I could write despite the lack of ‘story’ or ‘idea’.

So I kept going.

I wrote for ten minutes, then thirty, then an hour, then two… Eventually I built up to writing for three hours. WHATEVER came out. Sometimes it was story, sometimes it was crap, but all times it was writing.

So then it wasn’t Writer’s Block.

It was Knower’s Block.

That distinction has helped me out of a hole more times than I can count.

Why? Because it begots the question ‘What am I doing?’, or ‘What is the character doing?’.

Maybe ‘What does the story need?’

It’s helped me to know when a story has legs or not too.

So rather than me keep rambling, try it out, or not. These are just my opinions on how I dealt with it. We’re all writers and we’re all different. But maybe before a writer we should be curious to the process.

Who’d a thought?

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