Writer’s block is a pain and a half. You don’t want it, I don’t want it, and we’ve both had it more often than we like to remember. You sit down, you stare at the page, and you realize that the only thing you can think is, ‘Squirrels taste yellow with mayonnaise.’ Probably your experiences is different than mine on the details, but you get the idea. Your brain freezes, your words won’t come, and nothing gets written. Not only is it frustrating and a waste of time, it makes the writing you love feel like a slog. What can we do about it?

To start with, when writing, learn to put distractions aside. If you listen to music, find pieces that you aren’t pausing to analyze or harmonize with. Force yourself to stop worrying about everything else for as long as you’re writing. When I sit down to write, I have to set aside my thoughts about a story I read, political issues, the food I just ate, or what I’m going to do tomorrow. Whatever it is, I can’t keep thinking about it. Why? Because if I’m using part of my brain to worry about tomorrow’s lunch, my attention is split, and my ability to actually write is severely compromised. Generally speaking, any writing worth doing (besides grocery lists and their ilk) needs your full attention to be done well. This is not so much a fix as a prophylactic, though.

Next, let’s move on to the bog-standard type of writer’s block, the type where you hit a wall at the end of a paragraph and can’t figure out what comes next, at least not anything coherent or worthwhile. Two basic strategies should prove helpful here: outlines and pushing through.

Some of us already use an outline, but even if you don’t, it might be worth trying as a method to deal with writer’s block. It doesn’t need to be a formal timeline or plot summary either. In overhauling my current project, I write only extremely minimal plot outlines, two to three sentences of summary. Even then I only refer to that outline rarely. What I use much more extensively is my bullet-point list of goals. I make this list before writing a chapter, adding to it as I write, and it gives me a path forward when I get stuck on figuring out what comes next by giving me a list of things the chapter needs to do.

Don’t dismiss the potential of knowing where you’re going. Even if you don’t write an outline, keep a list of ideas you’ve had and directions you think the plot could go (and how it would work). After writing the first chapter of one new project (not yet complete), I went and wrote a single-spaced page of plot summary, laying out where I saw the story going. Inside that ‘outline’ (to use the term generously), I left a number of literal questions and lot of vagueness. Then, when I resumed that project several months later and wrote the other thirty-six chapters of the first draft, I started with that outline… and rapidly discarded many of the ideas in it. Even the ones I kept I altered. What was important, though, is that the outline gave me a place to start. Writer’s block can be forestalled by brainstorming a general ‘where is this probably going.’

The ‘outline’ or ‘goals list’ solution is really more of an aid than a solution. In the end, writer’s block has one true remedy: push through. Don’t just wait, work. Don’t stare at the screen or the page blankly; furrow your brows and work out what needs to happen next. Sometimes you’ll need to write something less than ideal to get going again, a section that doesn’t need to be there or that you know wasn’t very well told. That’s fine. You’ll be drafting it again, and fixing those problems is exactly what drafting is for. The important thing is to persevere, to get over the hump and back to work.

In order to figure out what to write, though, a few questions can be helpful. Ask the following: ‘What would each character do in these circumstances?’¹ ‘What plot elements are at work here?’ ‘What character or plot events and pay-offs can I work towards?’ ‘Is there some description that needs to reach the reader around this time?’ I could come up with more than these, but frankly it’s better if you take the principle and forget the precise words. Writer’s block is a choice-paralysis where you don’t see any choice except the actually unusable ones; the point of these questions is to turn your thought process in the direction of usable choices.

Of course, writer’s block isn’t just a problem when you’re doing the actual word-by-word writing. If, like me, you like to do some prep work beforehand, you’ve probably at some point asked yourself a question like, ‘So, how do I solve this problem?’ or ‘So, how do I keep this character from messing up my whole plot without authorial intervention?’² There are a thousand things to figure out in every story, whether you’re doing the analysis before or after writing (I do both, because drafting). Logistics can be tricky. Story elements can contradict in a way you didn’t realize, giving you the choice between losing one (which may have knock-on effects or simply not be something you’re willing to do) or figuring out how to tweak and reconcile them.

These problems sometimes work themselves out with just a little thought. Other times, though…. More than once I’ve had to face the question of ‘so, what will happen after X, Y, and Z?’ and had no real answer. It’s writer’s block (no good answers, no obvious path to good answers) only in the brainstorming stage. Here, it’s often helpful to write out the problem, force it into tangible terms. Having done so, you can analyze it. Ask questions about it. Find the heart of the problem, look through your notes to see if you already have a solution, and don’t be afraid to write a bunch of stuff you’ll end up realizing isn’t a good choice. The point is to see everything on the page, and those bad options are stepping stones to better and better ones.

Sometimes this doesn’t help; sometimes your brain just freezes, like a cheap laptop computer trying to run a graphics program. Here I find that since thinking, unlike writing, can be done without external implements, walking away from the keyboard or the paper for a minute is helpful. Lay down on your bed, sit on the couch, sprawl on the floor, do something that takes literally no thought and that relaxes you. Then, talk it through with yourself. Ask what the problem is, break it down into its parts, see what bits you already have an answer to. Then work your way to an answer on the rest- or the start of an answer. You don’t necessarily need to find more than the beginning of the answer, though. Get a possibility in mind and then go back to your usual process. Think about the idea, write it out, work it into the rest of the story and see how it fits. Don’t just cram it into your story; be willing to change it as the story needs, whether in planning or while writing it into the story proper.

Finally, let’s talk about story-fatigue. Once I decided to see how many words I could write in a day; I hit 6000. For the next week, I could not get my brain interested in writing that story. This same problem, to a less dramatic extent, is part of what makes the last third of a draft way harder than the middle or beginning. That story’s metaphorical muscle has been exercised to the point of exhaustion. How to deal with this?

First, be careful about burning yourself out on writing a story by doing more than your brain can handle at a time. Everybody will be different, but find a good pace and stick to it. When you go over, be prepared or take countermeasures. In my more recent attempt to break my words-per-day record, I hit 7500 without burning out on the draft because 5500 of those were the first draft of a short story (this one here).

Second, I recommend taking short breaks from writing at a regular interval. I don’t write on Sundays except recreationally (that is, because I really want to). This choice is partially practical and partially theological. Third, if you feel that the story you’re working on is getting to the point of deleterious fatigue (and that you’re not just writing an natively more difficult section), consider taking a break by writing something else for a period. You can stop writing altogether, or you can choose a different project for a week or two. A short story is a good pause project.

Writer’s block isn’t insurmountable. It’s probably not avoidable, but by persevering and learning how to deal with it, we can get better and better at getting through it. By asking questions, we seek to find the starts of answers, then pull on those strings to get to something useful. The process of working through it is often painful, but in the end, if you want to write something, you’re going to have to keep going. God willing, the story at the end will be a thing of beauty more than commensurate to its pain.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – Seat-of-your-pants writers, rejoice!

2 – Here’s an article that discusses the dangers of authorial intervention.