Good morning!
Anyone who sets out to write a story longer than fifty words is going to run into an ailment authors and writers know all too well: Writer's Block.
Whether you stare at the screen and nothing comes to mind, or you just can't seem to sit down to actually write, it doesn't matter. The inability to move forward with your story is simply a case of writer's block.
I am currently suffering from an odd strain of the illness myself: It's not that I don't know what to write, and it's not that I can't find the time. Quite simply, I don't want to write because I don't want to do to my characters what I have to do to move the plot along. It's a rare strain of writer's block, but still, there it is. I am blocked. I am physically not moving forward with my writing.
So what is the cure?
Some will say to change your location. If you write at home, go to a coffee shop, a 24 hour diner, someplace where the people and noise are different. Also...coffee.
Some will say get physical. Go for a walk, a swim, a run (if that's your thing, I don't personally run. I will be the first person eaten in a zombie apocalypse.)
Some will say take a break from writing and come back when the spirit moves you. I did that. I was gone from writing for more than ten years. I do not recommend taking that long of a break.One writer friend of mine suggested writing at a different time of day. I tend to be more productive late at night. However, the older I get the harder that is. So, my writer friend said, try writing early in the morning...like at 4 AM.
Ummm, yeah. Thanks, but...no. As my many, many, many aerobics instructors will tell you, Sarah is NOT at her best at 4 AM. (or 4 PM, come to think of it. I'm really a night owl who functions okay between 7 AM and noon, just enough to hold down a job as long as my work hours don't go too far past noon. Which is a problem for my boss, who expects me to work until at least 3PM.)So what's the cure?
Well, there really isn't a cure. Sorry.
Any one of those suggestions above can, and have, worked for me in the past. Again, I do not recommend taking ten years off. That's not the way to get things done.
Now that I've gotten a couple novels under my belt, I realize that there's really only one way to get past writer's block.
It's actually sort of a simple thing, but it's the solution we forget as writers. We ignore what is staring straight in our over-caffeinated (or wine-soaked, depending on the time of day you write) faces.
We must write.
We must write ourselves out of the block.
If we aren't, we are rusting. The brain's creative faucet slows to a stop, and we become just one more person who "would write a novel if I just had the time."
Maybe shake up your characters. Make them take a trip, put them on a bus with strangers. Give them a disease. Burn down a building. Kill someone (but only in your story, killing in real life is wrong). Hey, it works for soap operas and prime time dramas. Why can't it work for you?
So yeah, I'm stuck on my fourth Nora Hill novel. I'm stuck mostly because I don't want to end it. But I'm also stuck because I'm not sitting down and doing it. And even if I write nonsense that I would never use in a book, I save it to my files because you just never know when what you thought was stupid winds up being the thing that makes your book. But a story won't get told, a scene won't be seen, a character will not speak until you write it down.
Even if just to delete it all tomorrow.
