Do It Anyway: A mantra to beat Writers' Block

Writers' Block is a familiar, formidable enemy to most writers. The paralysing fear that takes hold when we sit down to craft a scene or poem, the unavoidable question that hovers about as we type or scratch away at a notebook: "What if it's no good?"

Let's look at that. "What if it's no good?" Imagine yourself sitting at your keyboard or desk with your paper and writing the absolute worst drek the world has ever seen. So what? No one has to see it. No one besides you has to ever lay eyes upon it.

Crap drawing of a trashcan for your crap writing

During NaNoWriMo, I find it very freeing to declare before the marathon starts, "I am allowed to write the absolute worst drek the world has ever seen. Whatever I write is my own and I may do with it as I please. If I finish and decide on the first of December to shred the entire 50,000 word manuscript, that's my business. My friends and family do not have to see this. There is no shame in writing, no matter its quality."

Or words to that effect. The point is, as Lawrence Block points out in "Telling Lies for Fun & Profit", to "do it anyway". He makes reference to the plight of long-distance runners who hit a bad patch, where 'everything hurts and the whole process seems unendurable and the runner wants nothing so much as to drop out of the race." Books, he says, have bad patches too. "The important thing is to get through them, to get the words down however ill-chosen they may seem."

And you may find, once you've gotten started, that it's not so bad after all. That the words start to flow and, after perhaps a shaky start, they sort themselves out and things go along quite swimmingly. If they don't, well, there's always the shredder. But even if you decide to euthanise your work after you've written it, keep in mind: you've written. And there's no shame in that.

A Rough Week

I feel kind of like a hack today. The latter half of the week has been rough for me. I've been plagued by old enemies from within, been driven down (and allowed myself to sink) into that bleak bog where dwells the Black Dog.

It's so easy to get down on myself when I've not done my writing for the day. Even if it's just writing for this blog, if I haven't touched it in a week, which is nearly true as of today, I feel like a supreme slacker. Monday I looked into joining a critique group with the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group. I'm also considering going back to the Montgomery County Community College's Writers Club, who have a critique group twice a month. I just don't know if I can stand having a room of bright-eyed new writing students circle every single adverb in my piece. There's an article I've been meaning to write for Associated Content about that. "Show, Don't Tell" is about more than adverb usage.

Yet "Self Editing For Fiction Writers" claims to agree, at least in principle, with the idea that adverbs are bad. They contribute to weak writing, the authors say. I believe in moderation. I believe that adverbs are not your enemies as a writer. They're easy to reach on the writer's shelf, but it's best not to get carried away. Don't dump the whole container on your story, but you can sprinkle a 'quietly' or the like here or there without spoiling things.

I've found "Self Editing" to be a very good manual so far. I've read through the first three or four chapters and gone through the exercises provided, and every time I pick up the book it makes me take out my novel manuscript. Which is a good thing, because March is National Novel Editing Month, or NaNoEdMo. I'm not officially participating, but it's a great reminder to get editing/revising. NaNoEdMo demands fifty hours of editing in a month. Having never edited on the scale of a novel before, I have no idea how much that is. With NaNoWriMo I know that 50,000 words is a pretty big deal, especially if you're a member of the "Indiana Jones School of Writing" and fly by the seat of your writerly pants during November.

I had hoped that if I could get my writing legs under me again today I might feel better about life in general. Looking at this post, I think that's a fair bet. Sometimes the best cure for writer's block is to write. Sounds backwards, I know, but having this blog is probably the best thing I've done for my writing life in a long time. I sometimes wonder who's reading this, whether there's any point in my doing this at all. But there is a point, even if I'm not being read. I'm writing. This blog has replaced my daily writing stretch that I did for a few weeks before I realised it was producing something worth sharing sometimes. It's a great way to stretch my writing muscles and grease the wheels of my writer's mind.

I need to remind myself of that now and again.

Critiques, Revision and Story, Oh My!

It's been said it's dangerous to show your fledgling work to people. Lawrence Block echoes this opinion in "Telling Lies for Fun and Profit", and I can't say I disagree either. Block argues against showing unfinished work on the grounds it gives you an excuse to interrupt your progress on the work, especially if the work is going well.

The piece I've tossed out to a couple of writer friends recently is a 26,000 word novel(ette) I wrote in 2005 for National Novel Writing Month. I've previously shopped the first few chapters around at my college's critique group, but that was a few years ago, and most of what that group did was circle every adverb I had written. So far I've heard from one of the readers, who has offered only that the story was interesting, that she wanted to find out what happened, but didn't care about the characters.

As a self-professed character-driven writer, this critique is more than a bit troublesome. If my characters are flat, I have a serious problem. This is but the first in what I hope will be a collection of critique comments on this work, but it's an inauspicious beginning. See Block's comment above.

The story is complete as written, inasmuch as it has a clear beginning, middle, and end. But it certainly could use some tweaking (or carving up, as the case may be), and fleshing out. I fully intend to sit down with Holly Lisle's one-pass manuscript editing instructions and do what I can, though it's easy for me to get lost. It's like trying to clean my disaster of a bedroom when I was a teenager: "where do I start?"

The more I think about it, the more I think I need to really dig into this story and determine if it's actually a complete start-to-finish novel. It's probably a bad idea to attempt to revise an incomplete manuscript.

In Which I Try To Find A Topic

It's a late morning, my tea is now gone and I don't know what to write about. It appears I owe at least one blog post for this week, though, so here I am. I haven't quite completed (read: actually started on) my topics list for the blog, so I frequently find myself sitting here staring at the screen, the wall, out the window, or grabbing one of my writing books, like Lawrence Block's "Telling Lies For Fun & Profit" and flipping through it for five, ten, fifteen minutes, ending up no closer to a topic for today than when I'd started.

I suppose the lack of ability to find a decent topic is as good a topic as any, given that this is a writing blog. At the risk of writing something so achingly boring and unreadable as to drive my readers away, I will attempt to write about this topic.

I've written about the fear and frustration of facing the blank page. I've written about procrastination. I've written about Monkey Mind. I seem to have a mix of them today. I'm tired and I keep meandering off to look at my email or ponder my previous posts here or worry about having a backup copy of my blog. All instead of writing in here. And now it's getting on to lunchtime and I'm still feeling pretty empty of content.

All this stuff usually gets pushed aside once I get going, but I'm having trouble hitting that mark today. I keep thinking of things I'd rather be doing than sitting here typing out a so-called blog entry for today. A blog entry, says my eager Critic, that has no substance and is useless and dumb and why don't I just save the file as daily writing blah and give the blog a miss for today?

Well, Critic, whether or not this post is full of blah or awesome, I missed a post yesterday and I'll be making up Video Thursday tomorrow (presuming I can find something good to post for that!), and whether or not I've actually got readers who are reading this blog and wondering where my posts have gone, I feel like I need to post something. Could be this is the boringest post evar. Probably. But it's early days, as for the life of this blog, and I feel it safe enough to have an occasional 'whut?' post.

I've reached four hundred words, which is generally my minimum length for a blog post here. I don't want to spam people, but I want there to be enough that my readers feel like they've actually read something.

And hey, readers? Hate to beg for interaction, here, but I'd love to hear from you guys. Post a comment, vote in the little silly poll I stuck up, click a rating at the end of a post, email me directly if you like. I've had a couple emails from irregular readers and those who read mostly via RSS feed, but I'd like to know if I'm talking to myself here. Thanks.

Crossed the five hundred mark, so it must be time to meander off to something else. This week's been a bit of a bear; next week will be a better blogging week, I'm certain. Until next time.