ILX writers - tips for getting over writer's block

I need a holiday, I think.

xpost

this is all too OTM.

I keep what I think of as a moving-puzzle schedule. Those puzzle things, they're a 4x4 square or what have you, missing one piece so you can shift the others around? I write six days a week. Five of them I write both in the morning and the evening; Saturdays, I write in the afternoon and night, because my girlfriend and I go out Saturday mornings.

I have a schedule figured out that gets all of my in-progress projects done by a specific date, along with a handful of days where nonspecific work is scheduled: getting ahead on my column, writing a short story, making up for lost time, whatever I feel like doing. Although I schedule specific work for each day, my deadlines are weekly: such-and-such amount of words by the end of every Saturday. If I end up getting twice as much work done on a Tuesday, and want to take Wednesday off? So be it.

I can shift those days around, is what I mean by the puzzle comparison: if my inertia's still strong from working on the novel on Monday, and I don't want to work on the column on Tuesday, then I just push the pieces around and switch a novel day and a column day. If I feel like I'm still working something out for all of my ongoing projects, then I move things around and make it a "free writing" day.

I didn't always work that way, but when I started doing so, I realized that I was getting twice as much done. The tradeoff has been that I have fewer spur-of-the-moment things I write, but that may be mostly because I'm working on novels and don't write as many short stories anymore.

So the way I deal with writer's block, of the first and second types, is to write something else, basically, or take the day off and write the next day instead. I have days when all I get done is 100 words (this is 100 words of novel, which is less than 100 words of article; I have no idea what you write), but writing a hundred still keeps me from getting hung up on the idea of "being blocked."

When I have to, I keep telling myself: no one gets "customer service block," no one gets "professor's block," no one gets "doctor's block." They just have days when they don't like work. Maybe they call in sick, maybe they do a bad job, but they don't make a big thing out of it. It isn't magic, it's just work.

(And specifically with novels: I can avoid most of the false starts by not writing chapter 1 until I know what happens in chapter 4. Nanowrimo's an exception.)

Good question, Huck. How do people who live with their partners (Tep?) find the time/space to write? Even if said partner is ALSO a writer, which is true in my case, Tep's too maybe? I can't remember.

We have separate offices -- mine is also the living room, which was occasionally inconvenient (when we moved in, we thought we were going to have one more room than we ended up with, because we had looked at the wrong floor plan) until we bought a cheap TV to put in her office.

She doesn't write, but she's a graduate student, so she has a comparable amount of "I need to focus on this by myself" time, especially since her work is so language-intensive and she's a more diligent student than I ever could be. That certainly helps, but I've been in that same position before, so someone's ... affection-hunger (which sounds weird, but is more accurate than "maintenance level") ... has a large effect too. Both of my long-term exes, it simply wouldn't have worked for me to spend this much time writing, and that's undoubtedly a factor in why I didn't.

xpost again; it was much harder for me to really defend writing as more than a hobby before I was paid for it. I'm not sure the best way to do it, exactly, except that it's important to make it clear that it isn't like making a model space shuttle, where you can sit down to it any time and know exactly which piece goes next. On the other hand, writers are prone to a lot of procrastinating techniques, and it can be good to make sure they're all strictly necessary.

I don't write nearly as much fiction as I used to, and I hardly ever write non-fiction, but this is the way I deal with songwriting. If nothing's coming together on a new song, I will work on recording or programming a finished song, or I'll work on another embryonic song if there's another idea floating around somewhere (and there usually is at least one other one).

When I was still writing screenplays regularly, I'd watch films to identify writing structures when I was blocked up. It takes a different kind of focus to watch (or listen) paying attention to specific structural elements, but it can be rewarding. It helps me get back into the mindset of looking at writing as a series of short steps rather than one long distance. Nine times out of ten my writer's block is caused by that overwhelming don't-know-where-to-start feeling because the task I want to accomplish seems too daunting.

A lot of the stuff I write (short stories in particular) starts out as enforced continuous writing. After I'm done writing that first "draft," I go back to the place where I started feeling like I had direction and purpose, and I just chop off everything before that and trash it.

Painting used to work the same way, but that was before I moved into an apartment where I'm not allowed to risk splattering paint on the walls, furniture, carpet, &c., which means I paint more carefully now, and it doesn't work as well.

My apartment was never so clean as when I was writing. I procrastinated with housekeeping.

But thank you for asking!

Ha ha ha I found out that I'm going to get a temporary handicapped parking permit. So anyone who wants to come to DC can borrow my car and park wherever the hell they want!

Pretty much everything I've ever written had been written in the hour or half-hour before it was due. Deadline urgency always manages to produce the freshest and best writing I can do. I'm ten years into a career of getting away with it, so I fear I'll never be able to develop better habits. Unfortunately, I keep getting away with it.

The downside is that if I have no deadline, or six months to do something huge, I cannot muster the same kind of urgency artificially.

Also I like what Tep said about how no accountants don't get accountant's block (or whatever).

The notion of writing as some kind of priesthood irks me, and I think it's part of what blocks people: the idea that they're doing something sacred and it needs to all come out as finished poetry, when really, you get further by just saying what you mean, quickly and clearly.

I've been writing a little bit every day for the past couple of weeks, and I think I'm getting back into shape, which will hopefully curtail future bouts with inadequacy or ineptitude or other self-inflicted speed bumps. At the very least, I hope it'll become enough of a routine that I'll just do the reps even if I'm not really feeling it.

If all else fails, I end up doing the "oh shit gotta write" deadline-pinchign thing that's been mentioned by other lovable inveterate slackers on Le Thread. It's how I skated through high school, after all.