My friend and somewhat mentor Jane Cleland (well, she chose my story for the Black Orchid Novella Award in 2018 and I attend her webinars on writing, so I’m calling her a mentor) recently gave a little web talk on writer’s block. She had a number of suggestions for getting out of writer’s block, which I will allow you to go to her website to discover. They were all good ideas.
Me? I sit down at my typewriter (not the computer) and type this sentence over and over:
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”
I find it’s very bracing.
Seriously, I have not had writer’s block in years. If anything, I suffer from writer’s diarrhea. I’ve written over 30 book-length manuscripts over the last 15 years and can’t seem to stop myself from writing more. I’m still waiting for the first novel to be published by a traditional publisher.
So I can at least say I’ve been successful in putting a lot of words down. Hell, I even publish short stories occasionally (such as another Minerva James story in Dandelion Revolution’s anthology, “Not Quite As You Were Told”).
How do I do it? One word: Volume!
(That’s an old merchant’s joke. Sorry.)
So, seriously again (It’s hard for me to be serious for very long), I find that if you are interested in the book you are writing, you tend to write it. You can’t wait to finish it. I’m in the middle of a paranormal novel right now–actually near the end–and I find getting to the computer to put another 1000 to 1500 words in each night is not hard, even if I’ve had a long day fighting other lawyers in court. (Though it would be even easier if I was working on a novel about a serial killer who goes after stupid lawyers.)
I started writing the novel for Nanowrimo, which I’ve previously discussed in this blog. You can look at my novel page and read the first few thousand words here. (You have to click on the keyhole to read the excerpt)
As I continued to write, the main character Jenny James talked to me in my head. She had a lot of experiences she needed to tell me about. She even talked to me in my sleep, so I had to get her experiences written otherwise she would have bothered me incessantly.
Now I’m near the end, wherein she has her showdown with the Dark Ones, Lost souls who have surrendered to the Darkness. She’s in the basement of a spooky old casino and has just been assaulted by these nasty things. What happens? I’ll find out when I get to the computer later today. I’ve just gone past the magic 60,000 word mark.
If you can’t get away from your book, you’ll write it. You’ll write it or you’ll go mad. You’ll write it even if you only have time for 500 words that night (which has happened a few times in this book). You’ll write it even if you’re exhausted at the end of your working day. You’ll write it because you have to. No one else is qualified to tell the story in your head but you.
Will it be published? For heaven’s sake, do you think I would have written 30 book-length (so far) unpublished manuscripts if I worried about such things?
I haven’t had a huge success in being a writer, but I am a writer. I know because I put words down on the page and never suffer from writer’s block.
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.“
Mark Bruce, Writer 