Nick's Journal · Craft Decisions
It was only a matter of time before I tackled this one, a favorite of every person who has ever attempted to write something longer than a chapter or two.
For those of you that have spent any significant time on writing, whether for a living or simply as a hobby (and given the typical earnings of an author it is probably the latter even if it was intended as the former!), writer’s block is something that you will come to understand and dread.
One week, the words will flow naturally, each chapter you write will seem to form on the pages almost without effort and you will end each of them knowing that what you wrote worked well. And then the following week you will suddenly stall, unable to think through how to navigate the story in a way that inspires you.
What I have personally found is that this often happens specifically after those chapters that were the culmination of many earlier chapters worth of build-up. You had spent weeks mapping out exactly how they would go as you were writing the foundation for them and in your head you had done all of the work needed in order to build the stage, set the scene and let your characters shine. The writing was almost an afterthought by the time it was needed.
And after all of that careful work, that intricate storytelling and the satisfaction of completing a longer arc in exactly the way that you had hoped, it is almost impossible not to feel a letdown. After all, those earlier chapters in which you were just laying the initial bricks for the arc you just completed did not feel nearly the same as the ending ones.
What to do then? Should you lock yourself in a room, give the key to your spouse, and only let them open the door when you hand them another completed chapter? Should you brew another pot of coffee (and another…) until you have broken through the block? I think the answer largely depends on where you are at in your story and what the specific block is.
If the block is a throwaway chapter, a bridge chapter that doesn’t serve a greater purpose but is simply meant to advance the plot, to move key characters to where they need to be or to close off minor trailing plot threads, then I find the brute force approach really is the best option. The chapter can be rewritten, and will be rewritten, as many times as needed when you are revisiting your initial draft and going through your normal editing process. Getting bogged down on a chapter or two that your reader will be just as eager to skip through is not doing you any favors.
On the other hand, if the chapters are foundational for your next large arcs, or are pivotal ones in character development or resolution, then the block is likely your writer’s intuition telling you that you haven’t sorted out the right answer yet. If you are like me, you will have a frame of the chapter in your head before you write a single word. It may not be overly robust, but you’ll know the gist of what you want to accomplish. When you are staring blankly at your screen and your hands won’t move on the keyboard, that is your brain telling you that you have some thinking to do.
What works for the thinking? If there was an easy answer, this wouldn’t be a topic that plagues every writer. That said, I am able to get past writer’s block relatively quickly in many cases and there are normally three different strategies I find that work best.
The simplest one, and basically the default one that I use because if it works then the others are irrelevant, is simply stepping away from the work and doing physical things. Walking or jogging is great, exercise is great. When I don’t have writer’s block, I tend to listen to podcasts during my jogs, when I do, I switch to music and let my thoughts drift.
If that doesn’t work, I switch to a different form of writing. Hence my blog pieces, but I also tend to write non-fiction pieces to develop my thinking in those areas. Those ones I don’t publish but I find the switch from fiction to non-fiction usually works to keep me writing and allow my mind some time to think through the novel sub-consciously almost, resulting in ideas on how to proceed seemingly to arrive as if by magic when I return to the novel.
If both of these don’t work, I treat it like what it is, a work problem that needs to be solved. I am not one for procrastinating and hoping for divine inspiration. If it has been more than a few days and I’m still completely stuck then I start brainstorming. I map out the next ten chapters in far more depth than I normally would and I revisit the last ten chapters I’ve just written so that I am fully in tune with the pacing and feel of the story and have the best understanding I can of what the chapter needs to deliver.
Does it need some action, a break, a spark of romance or heightened tension and consequence? Once you are in tune with how your reader is feeling you will often solve your writer’s block quickly by simply understanding what the story requires in the moment and the direction you want it to point to and structuring the chapter accordingly.
For those of us who like epic fantasy and science fiction, we have been burned all too often by long and unreasonable delays between novels. In some egregious cases, the novels never arrive at all. To call those instances writer’s block is too generous, and a misdiagnosis. They are any number of things in all likelihood, be it a poor adjustment to fame, career fatigue, or victims of their own success. They are not, if we are being honest about it, writer’s block.
I will now switch back to the final dozen or so chapters of the second book in the series, having hopefully addressed my own writer’s block with this short blog post, and if the stars have aligned, having helped you to do the same.
Much love as always,
Nick