Beating Writer's Block

You want to write. You have time to write. You have a great idea for a story. You sit down, and you start, but then...you hit a brick wall.

You don't know what happens next.

You've got what people call Writer's Block. Trust me, all writers get it. I get it.

But not as much as I used to. Here's how I deal with Writer's Block:

Writer's Block happens when writers try to do two things at once: figure out WHAT to write, and HOW to write it.

WHAT to write is your story. The stuff that happens. That's always tough, right? You may have an idea about how your story starts, or an idea for a great scene along the way, or even a great ending. But how do you get from point A to point M to point Z?

The trouble is, too often writers sit down to write without knowing what happens next. We're all set to write--we have the word processor open, or a notebook in front of us--but we can't figure out what happens next. So we sit there, staring at the blank piece of paper, as time ticks by. Maybe we get lucky, and an idea hits us. Yes! We move forward. Or maybe we never think of anything, and a couple of hours go by, and we come away with an empty sheet of paper.

We never even got to the HOW.

HOW to write something is the words we choose, the sentences and paragraphs we write, the dialogue we craft, the settings we describe, the metaphors, the similes, the adjectives, the allusions--all that stuff we learned about in English class. That's a big job right there, figuring out how to tell a story in a fun and interesting way! That's enough work without having to figure out what's happening at the same time.

So here's what I do. I never write one word of a story until I have the whole thing mapped out.

I know. I know. That's a lot of work before hand. But trust me, it will save you a LOT of work in the long run.

This method doesn't work for everybody, but if you're regularly experiencing writer's block, try this. Stop writing your story. Instead, sit down and think about what happens next. When you figure that out, write it down. It can just be a sentence, like "They find a haunted house." Then figure out what happens next, and write that down. Then do that again, and again, and again, until you come to the end of your story. It doesn't have to be very complicated, or very specific--it's just a road map for you to follow as you write.

Once your road map is finished, go back to the beginning, or wherever you left off, and start writing again. Now that you've figured out WHAT happens, you're free to focus on HOW to tell it. That's still a lot of work--but at least you won't be trying to do two very difficult things at once! And you'll still hit writer's block in trying to think of what happens next, I guarantee it. I do too. But you won't be expecting yourself to come away with 250 words written at the same time.

In the coming weeks, I'll go into more detail about how I outline WHAT I'm writing before I figure out HOW to write it. (And I'll talk about that too.) But for now, just keep it simple. What happens next? Keep asking yourself that until you come to the end. Then start writing...