Got the Writing Blues? A 4-Step Guide to the Cure

Like falling sick with a cold, falling out of sync with what you’re writing can exhaust you. Maybe you’ve been writing novels and the only coherent parts are at the beginning. Your short story—though it’s short—actually doesn’t have conflict. The screenplay you’ve been working on is written with sparse dialogue. Still, you battle on until there comes that one blank page that leads to blank staring, and a blank head with no-idea-at-all-in-any-way of what it’s going to produce.

There is still hope! Like taking cold medicine, you can open a new Word Document and take a hearty dose of something new. (This is also when you grab some chocolate as your award for having courage.) Here are some tips for fighting the writing blahs by tackling a whole new genre or type of writing project:

Study. Yes, studying isn’t usually that interesting. But if you want to write something new and you have no idea how, finding some type of structure can help. A screenplay has a structure based on acts and page formatting; poetry has stanzas and surprising line breaks; novels have tension and character arcs that are not as smoothly-arching as a rainbow’s.

Become a copycat, not a copy editor. Finding writing inspiration can help way, way, more than you’d expect. It’ll make you want to keep writing when it’s an hour past your usual REM cycle, but don’t nitpick every single tiny, microscopic, detail to write just as well as your muse (yet).

Fracture the rules after you know them. Getting some idea of what to do/what not to do is helpful, but twisting around the rules that were “written in stone” can be liberating. It’s a way to get words written. (And it keeps you from tearing out the keys on your keyboard.)

Write. This is the very thing that NaNoWriMo encourages: writing a lot and making mistakes to fix at a later point in time. Really. Write what you want, without worrying about anything in the future. And leap off of the cliff. Wait. No. Don’t go cliff diving. Just start something new.

Irina Michaels is an aspiring novelist and screenwriter—she can be found at different places on the internet writing things other than novels and screenplays. She loves mythology and chocolate, and stacks books, having no other place to put them, on furniture that is expressly not designed to hold such weight.

Top photo by Flickr user ChicagoSage.