Writing Advice

The Craft of Writing: Writer’s Block

Writer’s block...the bane of almost all writers’ existence. You stare at the blinking cursor until sweat beads on your forehead, but the words just...will...not...come. What do you do now?

I have three approaches to dealing with writer’s block.

I firmly believe that most of what people call “writer’s block” isn’t actually a block at all, it’s your brain telling you that you’ve done something wrong, painted yourself into a corner you can’t get out of. The solution to this type of writer’s block is simple but brutal:

Start at the beginning. Read the story until you get a sense that something’s wrong, something’s coming unglued. Put your cursor there. Highlight from that point to the end of the story. Hit Delete.

Don’t try to save it or keep backups. Hit Delete. If you wrote those words, you can write better ones to replace them. Yes you might’ve sweated blood and tears over them, but if they don’t work they have to go. (I once deleted 40,000 words from a novel this way.)

The second kind of writer’s block isn’t actually block, it’s your words outpacing your brain. You’ve arrived at a point where you need to think carefully about what happens next. Hey, it happens.

When you hit this, switch to a different project. Let the back of your mind chew on it for a while.

At any given time, I usually have 4–6 books in the pipe. When I hit the point where I know the story is working but I don’t know what happens next in one book, no biggie. I switch to another. I let the word-mining Morlocks in my subconscious chip away at it while my attention is on another book. At some point, hours or days or weeks later, the solution will suddenly appear to me all neatly gift-wrapped and stuff.

This can sometimes happen in the middle of the night, at which point I’ll get up and start writing. On one rather legendary occasion, it happened in the middle of a very kinky threesome with my Talespinner and her other boyfriend, so I got up out of bed to write. (The advantage of dating writers and artists and makers and other creatives is they understand that the creative mind be like that sometimes, so they don’t take it all personal-like.)

The third kind of writer’s block is when the story is in good shape but you, the author, lack a vital bit of information. You don’t fully understand why a character wants the MacGuffin so bad or why the note the protagonist found at the crime scene is so important or what the significance of the red balloon might be or what the antagonist will do when she discovers where the protagonist is hiding.

At this point, I solve this problem by hashing it out with another person. The lovely thing about working with a co-author you trust implicitly is that this kind of block is much less common, because when you start to get close to a block of this sort, you just hash it out with your co-author.

That doesn’t always work. Eunice and I have been blocked on our murder mystery for months trying to solve one problem: Why would someone kill to retrieve a painting known by the victim, the killer, and the police to be a fake? We didn’t want to do the “because it’s actually a treasure map” thing, so we’ve been circling it for months.

While we were all in Reykjavik, I went to a lovely rotating restaurant with Eunice and her husband, and we bashed on the problem for, like, two hours straight, until her husband had an idea that caused the dam to burst…and the awesome thing is, in hindsight, the answer is clear and obvious and ties together two minor dangling plot points we were planning to address in the second draft!

The restaurant where it happened

People say writing is a solitary endeavor. I don’t believe that’s true. The right co-author makes tings so much easier. I would never have been able to write Spin, the magical realism literary novel my Talespinner and I are nearly finished with, on my own.