Cheese It
Five Cheats to Dash Past a Temporary Writer’s Block
Everybody gets a little stuck sometimes. I mean, I guess I can’t speak for everybody. There are probably some lucky people who never get stuck on anything. If you picked up a mixed-up Rubik’s Cube for the first time and put it down solved, this may not be the article for you. Maybe you blast through everything you try and never trip over a hurdle. If that sounds like you, you should probably be writing this.
Personally, I get stuck on things all the time. Also, I have ADHD and anxiety so getting stuck on anything initiates the procrastination/out-of-sight-out-of-mind loop wherein I get stressed because I don’t know how to move forward with something, and the stress triggers my anxiety so I walk away from my stressor to chill out, and then I get distracted because I have ADHD, and then I forget about the thing that stressed me out in the first place. Finally, I will notice that I’m not working on anything and start a project, at which point the loop is ready to repeat. Eventually I will work my way back around to something that stressed me out several projects ago and by then I’m no longer stressed about it. If you have enough projects going on, you can use them to procrastinate each other. My friend Gail calls this procrastiworking.
Since I know I am prone to this behavior, I have developed some strategies to prevent it from bringing my writing process to a complete standstill. I have to, or else Shelf Life would come out on a much-less-predictable schedule. Since writing is not an activity that I require to lead a functional life (like working, feeding myself, showering, and so on), I have to have ways of making myself do it without walking away and forgetting about it, because not writing has no natural consequence. I don’t run out of money or starve or smell bad if I go a while without writing. I just fall out of the habit and then it’s that much harder to start up again.
Writer’s block is the inability to start writing or keep writing. You can have an idea of what to write, you know how to write, you want to write—but you can’t write. Writer’s block happens for all kinds of reasons and I don’t have the solution to all of them. I do have some solutions for the specific type of writer’s block I’m talking about today, in which the writer feels stuck and unable to move forward because they are:
Overwhelmed or intimidated by the part they need to write next.
Unsure what to write next to move their story forward.
Demotivated by the fear of rejection or need to achieve perfection with the story.
Losing interest or inspiration for the story.
And probably plenty of other reasons. I think the items above capture several causes of writer’s block but there are probably as many specific causes as there are individual writers. This advice may or may not work for you but I find when I’m stuck and I want to get unstuck without losing the thread, one of these will usually do the trick.
Change Your Input Method
Hear me out: Changing the way you record your words can affect the way your brain works on what you’re recording. That is, your brain works differently when you are typing versus when you are hand writing versus when you are speaking and recording your speech. You can read a neat article in Frontiers in Psychology about how the brain behaves differently depending on the method someone uses for writing. Pens dot com has also prepared a cool infographic (with many source URLs if you care to dig into it more) on the benefits of hand writing versus typing and vice versa.
To summarize, typing is quick and allows the writer to capture thoughts quickly. Handwriting is slower and encourages critical thinking by giving the writer more time to think about the information they’re recording. The brain also operates differently when using speech-to-text recording versus writing or typing.
If you’re stuck on a scene, plot point, transition, or anything like that, try stepping away from the keyboard and writing the next scene by hand in a notebook. Or moving to another room and speaking the next scene aloud and letting Alexa or Siri record it for you. Reengaging your brain in another way can unstick it when it’s stuck. This trick works well when combined with the next one—
Reboot Your Brain
Turn it off and back on again. Actually, maybe you should do this first before trying another method. My friendly work IT guy always chastises me for trying every other solution before just rebooting my laptop when it’s not working correctly. In my defense, logging into all the layers of security the company requires kind of ruins my day if I have to reboot midway. But anyway.
When I say “reboot your brain” I don’t actually mean turning it off (please do not) but redirecting it to a different activity for a limited amount of time. And not another similar activity—that is, not another creative project. Instead, when my I find I am stuck somewhere on a creative project I might do any of the following to give my brain a break:
Walk my dogs.
Take a shower.
Tidy up a room.
Run a quick errand.
These activities are very unlike creative writing. They are all time-limited activities that have a defined start and end. That is, the dog walk begins when I clip the leashes on my dogs and ends when we come back to the house. Tidying up a room begins when I start and ends when that room is tidy (danger for procrastinators—if you move on to start cleaning another room you are definitely procrastinating).
What I do not want to do is get engaged with something else that’s going to keep me away from my project for more than a half hour or hour. I don’t want to turn to a different creative project or something that will engross me or occupy my mind. Instead, I want to do something for a limited amount of time that uses my brain in a completely different way. Ideally, I want my brain on light duty so I can let me subconscious work on the problem while I do something easy like navigating around the neighborhood or washing my hair.
Coming back to the project with a rebooted brain usually gets things moving again. Going for a walk, doing some light housework, or running an errand are all great opportunities to record some voice notes as well and use a different input method for a little bit. We call this the one-two punch.
Time Travel
Not literally. If you’re stuck on a part of your story because you don’t know where to go next, or you’re not sure how to transition to the next scene, or you’re intimidated by the part you have to write next—just skip that part. Skip ahead to a different part that is easier or that you have already visualized. Lost inspiration or motivation or feeling bored with your story? Skip ahead to a more exciting part and start writing from there.
There’s no reason you have to write your story in the order it will eventually be told. The beauty of writing, and what sets it apart from oral storytelling, is that you can go back and rearrange it as many times as you want. There are no rules about the order things have to happen in, anyway—you can start with the end, you can tell things out of order, you can use flashbacks, flashforwards, you can intertwine parallel stories—you can do whatever you want.
But even a story that will ultimately be told in a chronological order of events can be drafted a different way and then reordered later. Write the easy parts first, they are practice for the hard parts. Or write the exciting parts first, so you have more text done and more sunk cost motivating you to write the slower parts. Or write the parts you already know for sure, and trust that you’ll figure out what goes between in the process.
If what’s got you stuck is the next thing, skip over it and come back later.
Head-Hop
Try doing the thing you’re never supposed to do: Head-hop around to some other characters’ perspectives for a bit.
If you don’t know what happens next in your plot and you’re stuck scratching your head trying to figure out how things develop from where you are, try changing perspective to another character. If you’ve been writing from one character’s perspective, you may be focusing too closely on what that character knows, what they want, and what they’re likely to do in any given situation. If you’re stuck, try shifting to another character’s perspective and start writing about what that character knows, wants, and is likely to do in the situation. Still no dice? Move to another character. Eventually they will give you something to work with—some dialogue, some action, some motivation, or something that you can take back to your main character and use to move the plot forward.
I don’t suggest you leave the head-hopping in your final manuscript, but that’s what revision and editing are for. Changing perspectives can be a great way to shake the plot loose and get the story moving forward again when you’re stuck.
Switch Projects
Finally, the (sort of) opposite advice from rebooting your brain (above). If you find you’re the type of stuck where you know what you want to write but it won’t come out as words, try writing something else for a bit.
Now: I already suggested you don’t engage with another creative project that will engross you and prevent you from coming back to what you’re working on. I’m not (completely) contradicting that advice here. Instead, what I suggest is that you take some time to get words flowing but not on a creative fiction project. Try writing something completely different. This could mean:
Freewriting.
Journaling about your day or something going on in your life.
Writing an email or a letter to someone.
Write an essay about something unrelated (boy does this work).
Writing a set of instructions for doing a task.
All of these writing tasks help put the brain in “writing mode,” that is, in a mode of converting thoughts into verbiage that can be expressed in writing. Spending twenty or thirty minutes putting down words that don’t require a lot of creative thinking can turn on the word tap so when you turn back to your story, the pump (your brain) is primed to pour out words. All you need to do then is redirect the flow to your story.
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