Overcoming Writer's Block: Avoiding the Trap
I may as well just say it. Writer's block, I'm convinced,
doesn't exist. Mostly, I think, authors use writer's block as an
excuse to explain to themselves, an editor, or a concerned
spouse why the book isn't done or the chapter hasn't been turned
in.
Writing is talking on paper. Sometimes literally. And you never
hear someone say, "I can't talk anymore. I've got talker's
block. There just aren't words there that can come out."
That said, there are several common traps that new writers
especially stumble into--and these traps stop writing progress.
Size Matters
One of the easiest traps is letting the sheer size of book stop
writing, as mentioned earlier. The prospect of writing 300 pages
is daunting. Especially that first day you sit down. It's easy,
especially if you're inexperienced or emotionally worn out, to
collapse under the mental burden of all that work.
The mental trick, I suggest, is to not think about those sorts
of numbers when you're writing. You need to bite off reasonably
sized chunks and focus your energy and anxiety on just today's
chunk.
If you're writing in the morning before you have to go to your
standard job, maybe you should do a thousand words a day. A
thousand words is a bit of stretch but still a manageable goal.
And if you pace yourself and write, for example, a thousand
words a day, at the end of the week, you've maybe got a chapter
done. And at the end of four months, your book is done. That's
how it works.
Don't sit down each day with the burden of writing 80,000 words
or 300 pages. Sit down to your very manageable goal of writing a
few hundred words. It makes all the difference.
Bad Metrics
A second stumbling block relates to the first. While writers,
editors and publishers commonly use measurements like words or
pages to specify how big a book should be, you don't really
build a book with words or pages. Books require more concrete
building blocks. And so, especially as you're trying to slog
your way through the first chapters of a book (always the
hardest for me, quite truthfully) you can't think things like,
well, so I now I need to write a thousand words. Instead, you
need to sit down and write a book building block or two or three.
Let me provide an example here. When I write some book about
computers or technology, in essence, all I do is string together
descriptions of facts, instructions for using some tool, and
real-life examples. And these are the building blocks I use to
create a book.
If I'm writing about how to use, for example, a word processor's
grammar checking tool, I might start by writing a paragraph that
explains what the tool does. Then, I might go on by providing
descriptions of, say, the six steps you take to use the tool.
Finally, I might wrap up the discussion by showing how the tool
works on some example text. And when I finish writing up these
three building blocks, I've got my thousand words.
Do you see how that's different from saying that you're going to
write a thousand words? A thousand words is the goal. But that
goal really doesn't help you grind through your writing. In
comparison, saying that you're going to briefly describe the
thing, provide some step-by-step instructions and give an
example is concrete. That concreteness helps you plod through
the writing.
You're probably not going to write how-to books about
technology. But you'll find that you too build your book using a
pretty small set of specific-to-your-genre building blocks.
Don't fiction writers do this, for example? The novelist
describes scenes, records actions, crafts dialog and so on. And
what this means again--remember that we're talking about the
myth of writer's block--is that if you're writing a mystery
novel you don't sit down with only the plan to write your
thousand words. That's too abstract. You need to sit down
planning to write some set of building blocks. Maybe today you
describe the hunting lodge as it looks when Petra and Michael
discover the old man's body. Maybe tomorrow, you craft the
dialog that occurs when the police interrogate Langston about
the missing oil paintings.
Especially if you're having trouble achieving your daily word
counts--and probably even if you aren't--you need to use
standard building blocks to construct your book. The building
blocks let you get the content onto the page.
Small Ideas Mean Big Problems
Let me also revisit something else I often saw when I was a book
publisher. Sometimes the real problem a writer is having is
trying to turn a little idea into a big book. Yet this problem
is misdiagnosed as writer's block. Some topics don't merit a
book. They may be great topics, but optimal treatment maybe
requires ten page or fifty pages. But a book needs to be bigger
than that.
I suggest that early one you can test your idea by writing a
couple of example chapters and then making sure there's not
redundancy in those chapters and that there's still good content
available for two or three more unique chapters. That technique
should work. But let's say you didn't know that when you agreed
to write a book. Or that my suggested technique, unfortunately,
didn't work in your special situation. What can you do?
You're in a tough spot in this case. You need to expand the
scope of your book without screwing up the book's original
purpose and justification. If I were you and found myself in
this position, I'd try to figure out how short I was coming up.
Like, am I fifty pages short? A hundred pages short? Once I had
this information, I'd brainstorm to develop a list of related
topics that I could use to pad the book or beef it up. Finally,
If the book had already been sold, well, I'd probably swallow my
pride and have an honest conversation with the editor.
If you're only a little bit short, the fix is usually pretty
easy. Publishers can make a book seem larger by putting less
text on a page or by using thicker paper. If you're writing a
nonfiction book, maybe you can throw in an appendix that covers
some tangentially related topic or some extended bibliography or
a glossary. If you're writing fiction, I'm actually not sure
what you do. That's not my area of expertise. Do you add
characters? A subplot? I don't know. You better talk with your
editor.