Is there such a thing as Writer's Block?
No.
Ah…bit shorter than I’d intended that post to be. Tell you what; I’ll explain.
Now, as with all my Blog posts, interviews, and articles, the things I say are purely my opinions on life and on trying to make a go of this commercial-fiction thing. I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a kid, but I only learned how to write in middle age. When I was young – a conflicted teenager; an unfulfilled twenty-something office-worker wishing I didn’t have to shuffle someone else’s pointless paperwork for my living; an exhausted thirty-something Carer battling through every uphill hour – I wanted to write. I did. But I never got anywhere. Why not? Because I made one fundamental mistake: I waited for inspiration before putting pen to paper. I thought you only wrote when the muse settled, and what chance did it have to get a word in, with real life crowding from all sides?
It took me decades to realise you need to prioritise your writing to do it justice. Honestly, the hoovering really can wait. Well, it depends, of course, on your true motivation – and only you know what that is, deep down. Obviously, if you’d rather have fluff-free carpets than a completed manuscript, by all means shimmy round the lounge with the Dyson like a Queen video, but if you want to be a writer…??
Make the effort to sit down before your blank sheet of paper, or in front of the flashing cursor on your empty laptop screen, and write. Anything.
Write a shopping list. Write down all the reasons why slumping at your desk with nothing to say is a daft idea. Write the Oscar acceptance speech you’ll naturally need once you inevitably win ‘Best Screenplay’.
You can’t expect to pump mental iron without a warm-up. You’ll doubtless junk the first two-thousand words, but by that time you’re getting going, the creative juices are starting to flow; decent, usable, relevant stuff emerges from the sludge, and you make progress. If the time’s going to pass anyway, you might as well use it to make baby steps towards your goal. After all, you can guarantee that if inspiration does hit, it’ll be at a time when you are powerless to exploit it – driving, in a meeting, in the bath – and by the time you’re in a position to write down all the brilliant plot ideas you had in the supermarket checkout queue, you’ve forgotten half of them.
Whether you have ten hours or ten minutes a day in which to work, you must maximise it. I promise it’ll make the creative process simpler over time. Your ‘writing muscle’ will become increasingly well-exercised, primed and ready to toil at a moment’s notice. You’re healthier if you take a twenty-minute hike every day than if you only attempt a two-hour ramble once a month. Writing every day will also ensure you sustain your thread, return with ease to the place you left off the day before, and maintain momentum, increasing both productivity and the overall merit of what you write.
Being ‘blocked’ is merely a lack of discipline, allowing mental fatigue to triumph over your desire to create, the hunger to achieve your dream.
Don’t write, and you won’t write – simple as that. I wasted more than twenty years waiting for the muse, over that time conjuring plenty of directionless fantasies of future success, and half-finished jottings lacking cohesive structure. It was only when I discovered the knack of writing daily, regardless of whether I felt like it or not, that I completed three novels in less than three years.
The sooner you figure out that working at it is the only way – there’s no secret passage to success you can sneak down, craftily shortcutting the long road of hard graft – the quicker you’ll become the prolific creator you deserve to be.
No escape. No excuses. There’s no other way to be a writer than to write.
Picture by Bill Watterson, 'Calvin and Hobbes'