Writer’s Block

If you’re just starting out with novel writing or you’re going through a particularly bad period of writer’s block, writing some fanfiction can be a great way to help your writing. You’re already writing within a pre-existing world with characters that have already been developed for you, so it gives you the chance to experiment and have fun. You don’t have to do all of this work into exposition and character-building, instead you can just jump right in and write a scene with a few of your favorite characters. Or write out a story that was mentioned as a character’s backstory, but that we never got to see within the events of the story. Writing in this uninhibited way can be a great way to regain some confidence in your prose while having some fun with your writing.

Characterization

Another benefit of doing a fan fiction writing exercise is that it allows you to practice characterization without having to build characters from the ground up. You may think it will be easy to write characters that already exist, but there’s actually a challenge in living up to the original source material. Recreating each character’s unique voice, thoughts, mannerisms, etc. so that they match the character that they’re based on is a challenge in and of itself. And, because you won’t need to actually create the characters, you can simply focus on the challenge of capturing their essence in your writing. This is incredibly useful since this is a skill set you need when you write your own characters as well.

The Rules

When it comes to fanfiction, you’re writing again within a world that already exists. This presents the unique opportunity for a writer to practice adhering to the ‘rules’ of a certain world without having to develop the concepts themselves. Every world that people write within has a certain set of rules or things that are possible vs. impossible. Writing fanfiction, utilizing a world with a set of rules that already exist, allows you to work on making sure the rules stay consistent and present within the story. Again, this is an important skill set to have when you develop your own world with its own rules, so this provides a unique opportunity to practice this in your writing.

Writing Prompts: 

a) Choose a movie with a rich world and/or set of characters. Write a scene that was mentioned in the movie, but never actually shown.

b) Choose one of your favorite television shows. Write a story or scene from the point of view of one of the side characters. Have the scene act as an explanation for a choice that the character made within the show.

c) Choose one of your favorite novels. Write a story or scene from the point of view of the antagonist of the story. Make sure to keep the characterization consistent and that the scene ties into the events of the novel in some way.

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1) Just Start

This may seem like a fairly obvious one, but you have to start somewhere right? Admit it, for months every time you’ve set aside time to write you’ve chickened out at the last minute. You suddenly find yourself very busy with chores you’ve invented or… hey, who put that remote in your hand? Don’t you dare start a new Netflix show… If you want to get out of your writing rut, you need to set aside time to write and actually stick to it, no excuses.

2) Start Small

When you’re picking up a pen after a long absence, it may be too much to expect yourself to jump right back into working on your manuscript. You’ll never fully lose your writing mojo, but you’ll definitely be rusty. The easiest way to get some practice without putting so much pressure on yourself is to do some writing exercises. Find some fun and short writing prompts and set aside an hour to challenge yourself. Perhaps the exercise will task you to use a character from your book or maybe you’ll have to write something entirely new. Either way, it’ll get your creative juices flowing again and it’ll help you start to get your confidence back.

3) Make a Schedule

One of the excuses you’ve made over the past few months is likely that you ‘weren’t feeling inspired’ enough to write. Not only do you know that’s just a poor excuse, but if writers only wrote when they felt inspired it would take five times as long for them to finish their books. Instead of continuing to use that as an excuse to let yourself drift off schedule for another few months, create a diligent schedule that you know you can stick to.

When it comes to making your writing schedule, our number one suggestion is to be realistic with yourself. If you realistically can only write once a week for a few hours, just put that on your calendar. The last thing you want to do put too much on your schedule and then keep missing your writing appointments that you set for yourself. Because every time you miss one you’ll beat yourself up, feel like you’re not a real writer, and before long you’re back to where you are now. It’s much better for your schedule and your writing confidence to make appointments you’re sure you can keep.

4) Join a Writing/Reading Group

Look into local writing or reading groups in your area. If you can’t find a good one, start your own with a few close friends! It may feel intimidating, especially when you’ve been out of the game for a while, but these groups can be a great way to hold one another accountable and bounce ideas off of each other.

If you’re planning on starting your own, there are a few options on how to structure it based on your needs. If you want to try to read more books to help improve your craft, you can start a book club and hold discussions about the material. If you want to workshop some writing, you could do a writing workshop where you take scenes (from either your book or specific prompts) and read/workshop them. Finally, if you have a few friends who are working on books/scripts/etc. you can host a group to simply bounce ideas off of one another. You can meet once a month, run each other through what you’ve been working on briefly, talk about any points where you’re stuck, and see if they have any suggestions.

5) Forgive Yourself

This is the toughest one because, ultimately, it’s the reason your absence from writing got so out of hand in the first place. Is your writing always going to be perfect? No. Are there going to be weeks where you genuinely don’t have time to write? Yes. That doesn’t make you any less of a writer than anyone else. Every writer has written bad prose. Every writer has taken absences that have stretched out longer than they should. You have to forgive yourself when you miss your writing days and on days where you feel like your writing is bad. Don’t let these things make you feel bad and don’t let them make you too afraid to pick up your pen again.

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The Beginning

Getting started can be one of the toughest parts of writing. You have this huge idea in your head, one that is going to have so many twists and turns and heartbreaks along the way. You’ve built up the anticipation, you can’t wait to get started on it. You sit down to write and…wait… what is the first page about? For that matter, what is the first sentence? Having a strong intro can put a lot of pressure on you and, of course, cause the dreaded writer’s block to rear its ugly head.

Instead of getting hung up on the first sentence or how the beginning sounds, focus instead on where you’re starting the story. It should be a point of action and answer the question ‘why does the story take place now or today?’ Once you know your starting point, simply begin writing with little regard to how it sounds. This will make you hate yourself for a few minutes, but once you get into a groove you’ll knock out the first few chapters and feel a lot better. Then, afterward, you can come back and clean up the intro. You’ll be able to figure out the perfect starting line a lot easier once you have an idea of where you’re going and what the tone will be.

The Middle

For some writers the beginning is the toughest, for others, it’s the middle. You were chugging along for a good while in the beginning, feeling confident and excited about your idea. Then you get to the middle and have a sort of ‘mid-life crisis’ about your whole book. Do you even like what you wrote anymore? Where is it even going? What if you just wasted months or years on something you barely even like? Should you go back and rewrite everything? Should you just trash the whole thing and start an entirely new idea?

The strongest instinct you’ll have here is to put down the project and either start something new or take a break from writing for a bit- don’t. Doing this will only make the idea of coming back to this book scarier and scarier the longer you’re away from it. We do recommend taking a break, but only momentarily to do a short-form writing exercise. This will help you feel more relaxed, looser, and therefore kinder on your work. It may also help to make a fresh outline for how the rest of the book will go. This way you’re taking a break from actually writing the book while also getting organized so the task of finishing doesn’t feel as daunting.

Before the Climax

Another common spot for authors to face writer’s block is right before the climax. This is another common spot for an existential crisis as it is when a lot of pieces need to be coming together. If they aren’t coming together as well as you’d hoped, you’ll likely be in a cold sweaty panic. There are a lot of threads that need to tie together so if certain things aren’t making sense, you’re likely getting frustrated and dejected at all the scenes you’ll have to go back and rewrite in order to make one thing or another make sense.

First of all, take a deep breath in… now out… there you go. Now, we firstly recommend going and taking a walk just to help calm yourself down a bit. Go to your favorite park or somewhere that relaxes you and makes you feel inspired. Secondly, try to clear your head of thoughts about rewriting because guess what? That’s not your job yet. You and your editor will find problem areas and work through them in the editing stage of your writing, that’s what editing is for. Leave those problems to future you, right now concentrate on writing an epic climax and resolution for your manuscript.

The Ending

The ending of your manuscript can lead to writer’s block for different reasons. This is because it’s hard to put a period at the end of your entire book that has an almost equal amount of pressure to your opening. What do you want your protagonist to be doing in the last line? Should you leave some things open-ended or make the ending more sweet and satisfying? You likely know a lot about what happens in your characters’ lives even after the story ends, should you give them an epilogue? This version of writer’s block can be strange because you know you only have a few paragraphs left to write but you can’t seem to pick up your pen and write them. Perhaps part of you doesn’t want to. Our recommendation if you get stuck here is to write a little excerpt, just for yourself, about what happens with your characters after the ending. After that, when you go back to your real ending, it won’t feel as much like you’re saying goodbye.

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Stop when you’re still going

The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck. That is the most valuable thing I can tell you so try to remember it.

Whereas most people will advise you to continue writing when you get into the zone, Hemingway actually advises the opposite. His trick for avoiding the dreaded writer’s block is to stop writing when he is in a groove and already knows where the story will continue to go next. This way, when you sit down to write next, it’s not as hard to get back into the story.

Read, read, read

[A writer] should have read everything so that he knows what he has to beat… The only people for a serious writer to compete with are the dead that he knows are good. It is like a miler running against the clock rather than simply trying to beat whoever is in the race with him. Unless he runs against time he will never know what he is capable of attaining.

Though we would advise against the idea of feeling like you have to compare your work with others, we definitely agree with Hemingway here. Reading work from authors that emulate the type of writing you aspire to will help you learn different techniques on how to achieve those goals.

Be a professional observer

Watch what happens today. If we get into a fish see exact it is that everyone does. If you get a kick out of it while he is jumping remember back until you see exactly what the action was that gave you that emotion. Whether it was the rising of the line from the water and the way it tightened like a fiddle string until drops started from it or the way he smashed and threw water when he jumped.

…Then write it down making it clear so the reader will see it too and have the same feeling you had.

Hemingway encourages writers to abide by the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule. Through this example, he is helping readers learn how to connect an action with a visible response in a way that shows clearly that the two are connected. You don’t have to say ‘catching a fish was exciting’ or ‘I found it funny watching the fish flip around’ in order for readers to connect the action with a character’s response- all you have to do is show them.

Be positive

Once you are into the novel it is as cowardly to worry about whether you can go on to the next day as to worry about having to go into inevitable action. You have to go on. So there is no sense to worry… As soon as you start to think about it stop it. Think about something else. You have to learn that to write a novel. The hard part about a novel is to finish it.

Here, Hemingway compares writing to being a soldier on a battlefield. He’s essentially saying there’s no point in worrying about if you’ll make it through because you’ll have to keep moving forward regardless. So don’t let yourself get in your own head about your worth as a writer or where your novel is going- just push through.

You need to have empathy

Then get in somebody elseʼs head for a change. If I bawl you out try to figure out what Iʼm thinking about as well as how you feel about it. If Carlos curses Juan think what both their sides of it are. Donʼt just think who is right… As a man you know who is right and who is wrong… As a writer, you should not judge. You should understand…Listen now. When people talk listen completely. Donʼt be thinking what youʼre going to say. Most people never listen.

Hemingway is stating that one of the most important parts of good writing is having empathy. Being able to understand people, their motivations, their strengths/weaknesses is key to writing people in a realistic way. If a conflict arises in your story, it’s not about who is right and who is wrong- that’s for your readers to decide. It’s about making sure there are good reasons behind both sides, reasons informed by who they are, what they’ve gone through, and how they think.

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If you ever feel like you’re suffering from a bad case of writer’s block, here are a few strategies to help:

1. Immerse yourself in nature. This doesn’t mean taking a sabbatical to the jungles of Costa Rica (though by all means…if you can…we’re not stopping you!), but it does mean to just go outside for a while. Focusing on the great outdoors can help clear your head and inspire you.
2. Sleep with a notebook next to you. You never know what ideas will come to you in your sleep. If you have that notebook nearby, you can jot down a few ideas before you forget them.
3. Write somewhere else.  We get it. You spent a lot of time creating an immersive environment specifically for writing your book. You have motivational posters on the wall and the lighting is perfect. You even added a desk waterfall to let soothing water sounds keep you in a tranquil, inspired state.  Maybe you need to spend a day out of that environment.  Go to a local coffee shop, the library, a park, even a different room in your house…anywhere that provides a change of scenery. The new surroundings may inspire you to take your book to a completely different place as well.
4. Develop your characters. Do some free writing that really dives into the background of your characters. You may not add this information to the book, but if you have a better understanding of your characters, you  may learn something new that you can incorporate into your story. Try a day in the life journal entry, a brief history, or even an in-depth physical description. 
5. Accept that sometimes writer’s block happens. Having a case of writer’s block doesn’t make you a bad writer. Nor does writer’s block mean you should stop telling your story. It simply means that today, you need to work from a different angle. Don’t be too hard on yourself. The tortured writer cliche is overdone, anyways.

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We hope that you went with the second option, and, if that’s the case, keep reading!

1. The first step in overcoming frustration is to accept your feelings. No one is perfect and the journey to becoming an author isn’t either. As with most things in life, there are ups and downs, twists and turns. The best way to deal with these ebbs and flows is to be properly equipped with the right tools so that you can handle them as they come. Wipe your memory of the expectations that you’re setting for yourself and reassess the situation. Don’t hold yourself to an unachievable standard – say, writing your book from start-to-finish in a week. That’s just not attainable, and when you realize that you’re not even close to reaching your goal, you’re bound to become frustrated. Approach your goals with a realistic mindset and you should see those intense feelings of frustration begin to dissipate.
2. Sometimes we all need to step away from work. If you can feel that your frustration is mounting and the words aren’t flowing, it’s time to close your laptop or shut your notebook, and focus on something other than writing. Grab a cup of coffee with a friend, hit the gym or catch a movie. Essentially, when you feel those familiar feelings of frustration, stop and do something else that you love. Give your mind a break and who knows, the distraction might spark creativity that will snap you out of your funk and get you right back to your writing!
3. Don’t use your frustrations as an excuse. There’s a fine line between frustration and procrastination. Because we’re all human, we have a tendency to let things get to us. We try to be perfect, but when we realize writing is an imperfect art at best, it can leave us feeling a bit irritated. So, we use that frustration as an excuse to avoid what’s necessary to make our dreams a reality. Frustration isn’t solved by wallowing in these emotions or refusing to write until you feel inspired. Sometimes, frustration is best handled by writing more. It might sound conflicting, but it’s true. The more you write, the better you’ll feel. You could even write about frustrated you feel. What you’re writing doesn’t have to make it into your book! It’s just a way of expression what you’re feeling.

The fact of the matter is that nothing in life worth having comes easy and this definitely applies to writing. So, roll up your sleeves, shake off those emotions and get back to working on your book!

Copyright Dorrance Publishing, 2017

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