Great question, Molly!

Here is my response, intended for any of us suffering from writer's block/prolonged procrastination.

............................................................

Acceptable procrastination techniques? Reading, cooking, physical exercise, dreaming. Sex. Introspection. Playing with dogs. Watching films. Everything is grist for the mill when you're a writer, because a writer is always writing--though not always on paper or a computer screen . . .

I'm convinced that all writer's block stems from one of three very real and daunting challenges:

(1) Writer's resistance. The natural (for most writers, eh?) resistance we feel when we sit down to write. Comprised of equal parts dread, frustration and fumbling. (This is hard work; this isn't going well at all. Why isn't this as good as I envisioned? Why am I struggling with dialogue, narrative description, pacing, POV? False start. Arrrrrgh!)

Cure: Just do it. Set a comfortable daily writing quota for yourself--far less than you think you should be writing (you can always write more if you're "in the zone" and feeling it)--and then stick to that quota come hell or high water. Accomplishing the daily minimum writing quota builds your confidence, skill level and self-respect.

(2) Not enough research/writing prep. The writer hasn't completed the necessary research to complete their writing project. 

Cure: More research. Not only acquisition of world-building details, character psychology and other pertinent facts that might come into play in any given work of created fiction but immersion in the works of other writers that inspired you to try your hand at Project X. Mood is critical: return to the work of your favorite writers (whoever they might be as you practice your own literary Shinto) and let the waves of tonality, color and selective emphasis of detail wash over you. In your mind's eye, walk beside your beloved mentors and draw strength and inspiration from their example. After all, they wrote for you, their ideal reader: pouring all of their passion, terror, wit, fury, joy, horror and humor into their books. Let them inspire and energize you.  

(3) Fear. You know what you want to write and how you want to write it but fear the reaction of others. People may look at you oddly or misread the work. Friendships and family relationships may be strained and/or broken, jobs lost, powerful people alienated.

Cure: Don't write. Problem solved. Except . . . you're a writer, right? Chasing yourself around in your mind in hopeless circularity: must write; can't write--until you collapse in physical and/or psychic exhaustion. Once this happens one of two things will occur: You will either begin writing, or . . . not. Personally, I hope you write. (If you're reading these words.) Because that's what writers do . . .

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 5/7/2014, 9:41 AM--

True, Kerry.  My worst cases of block nearly always occur when I'm trying to write the wrong scene (even the wrong sentence.)  Sometimes the simplest solution is the best:  dump the scene!  

Thank you, Lucy!  

@Atthys & Kerry: Very good point! It happens to me as well. You know something isn't working yet keep stubbornly hammering away at it, hoping for the best. You're talking about those instances when you're writing against your own best instincts, right? And not those moments when (as Stephen King puts it: close paraphrase): "You feel like you're shoveling shit instead of flying. But sometimes you're doing good work there; work you won't truly realize the worth of until later." You're referring to those moments when we absolutely know, beyond the shadow of our own doubts, that we're well and truly stuck--until we fix what's wrong with our writing.

It occurs to me that this, too, could fall under points 1 or 2. As either resistance--we're resistant to fixing what we know is weak or isn't working. Or fear: the fear of loss--we've expended energy writing ourselves into a corner and now can't bear to think of losing what we've created, or contemplating the additional expenditure of energy it will take to fix it.

As the cliche goes: been there; done that. Heh! Almost every writing project. Excellent point Kerry & Atthys; glad you brought it up.

PS. One of the techniques I use to soften the blow of excision or extensive re-writing is to save those passages of prose I can't bear to lose by appending them to the end of my working chapter or current short story (with at least a full page of blank white space between these excerpts and the story proper). Do you do this? Move your "murdered darlings" to a holding station pending obliteration? I'm using this technique right now with the sci-fi story, "A Matter of Displacement". I've written 30 pages of text for what will turn out to be a 12-15 page story. Mind you, this is in addition to the constant re-writing I do when I sit down to continue work on the tale: I always start again from word one and revise as I go. When I compare my re-written passages to what I originally . . . err . . . perpetrated, I can clearly see that they are superior in terms of precision, flow and color. (By color I mean both characterization and narrative description.) 

Good to talk to you guys! May all of your grammatical miscues/misfires and/or plotting mistakes resolve themselves as quickly and painlessly as possible.

--edited by Carl E. Reed on 10/1/2013, 11:54 AM--

Carl.  Writing "against your own best instincts" is precisely and aptly put, since I also agree with Mr King that sometimes the shit just needs shoveling.  Sometimes setting a scene aside doesn't accomplish anything.  You find you need something else in its place, and that can be just as painful, and just as uncertain.  In such cases, you grind it out and hope that far better versions await you somewhere down the road.  But I've certainly also had the experience where simply dumping a scene is like jettisoning an  absolutely useless (and heavy) piece of baggage from your cargo hold.  Wow!  Suddenly you're cruising along and gaining altitude, instead of limping across the sky.  And if someone had told you at takeoff that you wouldn't want (need!) that scene, you'd have probably told them they were nuts.

Alright.  It isn't usually that dramatic.  But there's undeniable lift. And, at least for a few minutes, you really are flying.  You can do barrel rolls and loop-the-loops.  For a few minutes.  

Also, I love the idea of a holding cell for our condemned darlings, awaiting execution.  I've got several pages of notes left over from the last novel.  Things that just fell out or never found a home.  It's not unlike the situation of building a model from a kit and having pieces left over.   I'm still pretty sure I'll use them somewhere.  But (one more simile) like leftovers in the fridge that you can't bring yourself to throw away, perhaps it's only a matter of not enough time having elapsed.  Some of them, probably most of them, will soon be ripe for tossing.  

This topic is a sore spot with me. I have two problems. The first one is fixing things that I know need fixing. The second is that my semi-historical thing needs a whole lot of research. This gives me a decent excuse for why I'm not making headway. When you have a respectable cop-out, you tend to work it. I do, believe me I do. 

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My husband sees through me, but he's a seriously scholarly man and he's as fixated on plausible foundational material (which I twist into nuttiness that only students of the period will truly appreciate) as I am. Example: Sly's poem on Natural Philosophy is based on a certain seventeenth century female scientist's penchant for putting her theories into verse. I have stolen her opening couplet outright.)

.

So, my Eberhard's not much of a taskmaster. He investigates early modern science for me with touching enthusiasm. He's an enabler, he is. I love him for it. 

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What gets me moving? Unearthing some juicy tidbit that takes my nonsense to another level. John Dee, Elizabeth's Royal Astrologer, created a secret code, and odd symbols which scholars have never discovered the meaning of. Researching him on the web, I brought up the most enigmatic of his abstract designs on my screen, enlarged it, and froze. I called my husband, look, look! What do you see here? He answered, a cat! Which was my immediate reaction also. How fabulous is that? 

.

I already had plans to work Dee into my plot, and for Sly to have extensive dealings with him. Scholars of the period have speculated that Dee was one of Walsingham's undercover operatives. Sly has uncovered a plot against the Queen. He and Dee combine forces to obstruct an enemy dangerous, powerful, and wholly above suspicion. Supporting historical evidence of the encounter? Icing on the cake.

--edited by Mimi Speike on 10/2/2013, 3:43 PM--

This is a great topic;  obviously one writer's have grappled with forever.  I rarely suffer from writer's block (sorry to those of you who do!), but I think part of that is in the process I use.  As a screenwriter for many years, I was trained to plot everything out very carefully on 3X5 cards before I started writing.  It's a way of making sure you don't go down a rabbit hole and end up in China when your story is set in Kansas.  For a script, it's (approximately) 60 cards -- 30 cards/scenes for ACT I;  60 cards/scenes for ACT II;  30 for ACT III.

Later on, I added a wrinkle by creating a template in Word for each scene.  At the top was the location of the scene, time of day/night, and characters in the scene.  Then, below, I would write out everything I knew about that scene -- action, dialogue, everything.  Sometimes it might just say, "CAR CHASE."  Others, it would contain the entire scene, which had been roiling around in my head for weeks.  By the time I finished this "OUTLINE", the script was generally 30% written.  Once I sat down to write the actual script, it usually only took me 10-12 days.

I don't write like this for books...but then, my first three books have been novelizations of unsold specs, so the structure was already complete.  But I will say that working this way -- planning  before writing -- is extremely helpful in preventing W.B.

As for the torturous process of starting at the start, when all you have is a germ of an idea, I combine tons of research with good ol' stream of consciousness writing.  I sit down and write down WHATEVER comes to mind.  Themes...characters...voice... action/plot, plot twists... I don't edit;  I just daydream and...cogitate.  But I do it on the page.  

Then I go back periodically and read what I've written.  Generally it's a big mess, random thoughts flying all over the page... but eventually a few key ideas leap out and I say, "THAT'S what the story is!  THAT'S what I'm going to write."

And then the 3 X 5 cards come out.

Hope this helps somebody.

@McKenzie--I love that you just gave me even more justification that I can read when I "should" be writing. I did that all last weekend, and I have to say, it was a lot of fun . . . AND it did really get me excited about the writing I've done this week.

@Bret--Your suggestion RULES!! It sounds like a craft project, and I do love craft projects! (I may or may not just have made 100 makeshift notecards from abandoned cardstock I found in our supply room.) I want to try this out as I prepare for NaNoWriMo!

Lucy

Book Country Community and Engagement Manager

This thread has really stuck with me--just wrote about it (again), this time for the Penguin USA blog. Here's the post.

(Carl Reed, if your ears are burning, it's because I quoted you!!)

@Lucy: Thanks for sharing! It's nice to be quoted; even nicer to know that something I said helped another writer.

I'm just sitting down to write again myself; putting the final (mad?) touches on "A Matter of Displacement". Cheers!

Nevena commissioned a really great post from writer Roseanne Bane on the subject of Writer's Block (specifically post-Nano writer's block) for the blog on Tuesday. Did everyone see it? Roseanne has some great advice. I found this post very reassuring!

"But creativity is not an unending assembly line, nor is it supposed to be." --Roseanne Bane

I say, right on!

Megan Stielstra wrote a great piece on how she motivates herself to write, even when she has a thousand excuses not to.

What compels you to pick up that pen or open that word document to write?

Love it. I have seen some wooden blocks with "writer's block"  -- chiseled in the wood -- sitting on writers' desks to serve as inspiration.

I was inspired by Megan's post that Janet mentions above. I love her reasons and that motivated me this morning.

 Having a deadline always helps, too.

 How do you get out of your own way to get your writing done?

Researching and Bookmarking prior to a sit down writing session is essential to developing a writer's routine. When we cannot push through an unfocused write, we may be out of material.

A working writer on a deadline would be the best friend a novice like myself could have in my corner. They would be the masters of routine. If we cannot research online without distraction then we are lost. Many of my writing sessions end up at Youtube Fail videos.

With my research done and my juices flowing I can be productive. With my files and bookmarks and dreams on scrap paper I prevail!

Great advice from everyone. I gained some insight into the beast that is Writer's Block. 

I find that works for me as well...If I get REALLY stuck in a particular scene, I move on to another scene that I want to write.

However, eventually I have to go back and finish all these scenes that are half-done, so I would also advise developing the grit to power through the blocks and just accept that you can fix them in rewrite if you aren't happy with what you are currently putting down on paper.

I found this quote by Harlan Coben. Whenever I'm stuck I go back and read it once or twice.

You have to sit your butt in the chair and write.  You have to do that every day.  That doesn’t mean you lie on your couch and play with your navel.  That doesn’t mean you go shopping when the words don’t flow the way you think they should.  That never works.  It means you sit your ass in the chair and get to work.  No excuses.  And just so we’re clear: Outlining is not writing.  Coming up with ideas is not writing.  Researching is not writing.  Creating characters is not writing.  Only writing is writing (yes, that’s deep).  So cut it out with the writer’s block and the waiting for the muse to arrive and the artistic pretenses.  That’s all nonsense.

Again this is pretty obvious — and yet I’m shocked at how many people who want to write don’t get this.

On the money Charles

BIC, pen to paper, if you're stuck, or if that's your preferred method of writing.  Or, bic at the keyboard.  Naval gazing doesn't accomplish much.  As for outlining, that completely messes me up.

People don't get it b/c they're looking for excuses, generally speaking.

Writers are a creative bunch, and if we want to, we can figure a way around something even if it means skipping a section and coming back to later on.  There are all sorts of ways to beat a block, but avoiding it isn't one of them.  That's creating a monster, imho.

Hand write first and best but a folder or ten.

2nd become crazy as a loon and write on pure compulsive obsession.

Dravid

I've been away for awhile, I suppose experiencing some form of writer's block. Only I've been writing. Being able to write isn't the problem. I've started 3 novels. One lasted thirty odd pages and died. Another (just checked it) ran over seventy pages before breaking down. The last crashed at twenty something pages. They sit like broken down, rusting automobiles along a road, probably never to be fixed or started.

I don't know that any of this is writer's block. I tend to believe it's me and my penchant for always having the beginning of a novel while forgetting that stories tend to need a middle followed by an end.

Now, I'm in the thinking phase of a fourth, except I can't even figure out a decent start. At some point, either today, tomorrow or next week it will happen. At some point, either today or tomorrow or next week, too, I hope to have more than just a beginning. Maybe I'll focus on the end, write that chapter and then try to work toward it.

Burnout can really take a toll on a writer’s physical and mental state. It’s best to put down the pen once in a while and do things that you don’t normally do or treat yourself to a vacation. By doing this, you’ll be able to recharge and go back to work with fresh and fast.

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