WRITING ADVICE: Overcoming Writer's Block

Today I'm going to talk about writer's block. 

It's a question writers get asked a lot: 'What do you do when you get  writer's block?'



Well, the truth of the matter is, I've never had writer's block. Not the way most people mean it. They have an image of a writer sitting staring at an empty page, scribbling or writing a few words, then balling up the page and throwing it at a wastepaper bin.



Do I ever have trouble getting the words out? Sometimes. 

Do I ever get blocked, not sure what to write next? Often.

Have I ever been unable to solve those problems and kep on writing? Never.



It's because I have tricks and techniques to keep the words flowing. I get up, move around, think through my problem logically. I ask myself questions. I do some more research or reading. I brainstorm and mind-map. I go for a long walk by the ocean, etting my mind drift free. I force myself to put words down, any words, so long as I'm dealing with the problem. What am I trying to say? I might type. What is this scene about? Where is it set? 




Gradually answers will come to me.



Here is one of the most striking quotations I've ever read about writer's block. It was written by Joseph Conrad, who wrote 'Heart of Darkness"




"I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day - and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working way of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren't do it for fear of waking the baby and alarming my wife. After such crises of despair I doze for hours, still held conscious that there is that story that I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again, and at last go to bed completely done up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with that horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts....




I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can't write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. ...I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid - in an evading shape. I can't get hold of it. It is all there - to bursting, yet I can't get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water....




I never mean to be slow. The stuff comes out at its own rate. I am always ready to put it down...the trouble is that too often, alas, I've to wait for the sentence, for the word... The worst is that while I'm thus powerless to produce, my imagination is extremely active; whole paragraphs, whole pagges, whole chapters pass through my mind. Everything is there: descriptions, dialogue, reflection, everything, everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing needed to make me put pen to paper. I've thought out a volume a day till I felt sick in mind and heart and gone to bed, completely done up, without having written a line. The effort I put out should give birth to a Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then."



The very fact that Joseph Conrad was able to write so much, and so movingly, shows that he doesn't truly have writer's block. All he is missing is "the conviction, the belief". In other words, faith in himself.



Faith in yourself and your story and your style is something no-one else can truly give you. You need to find it yourself.  

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