Crush Your Writer’s Block With Four Little Words
No Spoilers But They’re Not Even Interesting Words
The alternative title for today’s article was “The Garbage Bridge That Laura Built”; I try to keep the title descriptive, though, so you know when you can safely ignore Shelf Life (always) versus when you really should read it (never). Listen, I have garbage bridges on the brain. It’s a Valheim thing.
This is going to be a short and sweet Shelf Life today, friends. I know I say that every time, but today it might be true. You won’t know till you read it. There’s a chance that it will be true, for once, today. I say it will be short and sweet because today I have one—and only one—tip to impart. People seem to like my shorter articles better, and so I’m always trying to be briefer. Today’s article has a very specific mission: It contains one (1) trick for crushing one (1) type of writer’s block.
There are a lot of kinds of writer’s block, or at least there are many reasons for writer’s block, and the solution to each problem depends upon the cause. I like to break these kinds of blocks into a handful of categories with different solutions.
You don’t have anything to write about.
You don’t have the motivation, time, or energy to begin or continue writing.
You’re stuck somehow, not knowing where to go next, how to get to the next scene, or what words to use to say what you need to say.
To cut right to the chase, the volume of today’s article is on item number three—but I’ll touch on one and two (briefly) as well.
Item number one strikes when the problem is your topic or idea. You don’t have an idea, or the idea you have isn’t interesting enough to sustain your writing, or your idea is too big and complex and you’re not sure how to tackle it, or you haven’t created enough plot to drive your story to the finish line. I’ve written about a bunch of these situations already. For instance, when you can’t write because you don’t have an idea that you’re into. Or, as I discussed in a recent article about knocking out the first draft, when the idea you want to write intimidates you. And if you have a story idea but you’re not sure how to turn that into a novel, it might be that you haven’t developed a plotline to carry the reader through your story—reach way, way back into the Shelf Life archive for some thoughts on stories and plots.
Item number two is another big one that hits a lot of writers hard. Building a new habit is challenging, and if you want to write regularly—which you must to improve your writing skills—then you have to make it into a habit. Adding any new thing to your life and maintaining it is tough. If you want to start exercising, or get a new pet, or start cooking at home more, or reading every day, then you have to spend the first couple of months using willpower to establish that habit. You can’t rely on something being fun or enjoyable to turn it into a habit—many if not most people will run out of enthusiasm before the habit is firmly established. If the thing that’s preventing you from writing is that you never seem to have the time or motivation to just sit down and do it—or you do, but only for a few days before you give up—it’s time to think about how to build a new habit solidly into your routine.
Sometimes you have all those things above squared away. You’ve got your idea, you’ve developed the story, you’ve outlined the plot. You’re as prepared as you can be for drafting. You have the writing habit, the time, the energy, the motivation. You sit down and . . . nothing. You know what you need to do, but you’re unsure how to put it into the right words. You know what you need to say, just not how to say it. You need to extricate your character from the scene they’re in, so that you can begin a new scene. Maybe you’re bursting with ideas for the next thing, but you have to finish the thing you’re writing right now first before you can. GRRM got stuck in that situation for like fifty years, remember? The Meereenese Knot?
Anyway, I was in this situation a few years ago—more than a few years ago, okay, probably a lot of years ago. I was having trouble with this very thing. I don’t remember the specific writing dilemma but I was stuck. I had a character that I didn’t know how to move from point A to point B. It was really stalling out my work. I had several days of sitting in front of the writing apparatus frowning, writing little bits and then deleting them. I had written several inconsequential short stories in the lull. I spent a lot of time thinking about the problem and how to resolve it. I laid awake at night turning it over in my mind.
One day at work, I was chatting with a friend of mine named Laura. I told her the problem I was having. I told her, I don’t really know how to transition from where I am right now, to where I need to be next. All my careful outlining has left a bit of a gap and now I’m not sure how to fill it, how to bridge across to where I need to get.
Laura had (and likely still has) a particular facial expression that she makes when someone has said something inexplicably stupid but she is too mannerly to say so. I myself was not the recipient of this facial expression all too often but I had seen it a lot of times. She gave me this look and waited a few moments, I assume to see if I wanted to revise or recant what I had just said. When I didn’t, she said:
“Oh, when that happens to me I just write ‘and then they left’ and move on to the next thing I know how to write.”
I offset that because it’s so important. I looked back at her and I was like, “What? No, you can’t just build a garbage bridge from where you are to where you want to be and gloss over the thing you can’t write right now!” And she goes, “Why?”
Why, indeed? After some more questioning, I ascertained the whole of this aspect of Laura’s writing method. She had the vague shape of her plot in mind, but there were a lot of things missing and she didn’t always have them figured out before she started drafting. Whenever she came to a scene she didn’t know how to end, or she didn’t really know how to transition from one scene to the next scene she had in mind, she would just wrap up the scene with “And Then They Left” and move on.
Like me, Laura is an editor. She knows that you can turn a molehill into a mountain during revision. And when I considered her method, I realized something important. Although I usually go into the drafting phase (of anything longer than a short story) with pretty much the entire plot figured out and a long list of the actions that absolutely have to happen to get to the end of the story, I still—every single time—end up having to go back and add things into the writing I have already done because later on I realize I missed something. Something I’m writing at 50,000 words in isn’t supported enough earlier on. A character who shows up late in the story wasn’t even hinted at earlier. An object of great importance was never even noticed until the moment when it suddenly became crucial to the plot.
My point is this: No matter how prepared you are to tackle your first draft, you’re probably going to build some garbage bridges in it. You might do this unknowingly, like I do, or you might do it knowingly—and in fact with great aplomb—like Laura does. Those who suffer from this specific type of writer’s block are the writers who know they are in danger of writing a garbage bridge and are resisting going down that path. If you are dealing with this type of writer’s block, if you’re stuck somewhere in the middle of your draft not because you don’t know what’s coming up but because you don’t know how to get to it, then try to get comfortable with building a garbage bridge.
You don’t have to use the exact four-word sentence that serves Laura so well. If you have an idea of what shape the transition will take, you can employ that idea to support your bridge a bit. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. This is a task for revision.
You’re going to have to tackle this transition at some point—if not right now, or later in the draft, then in revision. But if you gloss over it now and pick up at the next point in the story where you feel confident, the block you’re struggling with might resolve on its own as you hack your way through the draft. You might not even have to deal with it in revision. As you work through the draft, you’re going to find things that have to be inserted earlier—and you’ve left yourself a bunch of nice open spots to drop those things in.
Got a character who just defeated a small horde of zombies and you need to get her back to the abandoned church and you’re not sure how she gets there? “And then she left.”
Did your main character finish up everything he had to do on Alpha Centauri and now he’s got to get to Vergon 6 for the next part of the story? “He was all done on Alpha Centauri so he got on a rocket ship and left.” Hurray, you did it!
Someone suffering from a grievous wound and you need to get them through that healing process so they can carry on with the story, but you need to do more research to even understand what this character is dealing with? “After a while, Robert was fine.” Move on to the next scene. Robert’s fine. Everything’s fine.
The thing that people don’t like to acknowledge or accept is that first drafts are not good. Everybody wants to be the person who wrote a first draft that was actually good and didn’t need revision. People work way too hard and take way too long trying to figure out the perfect way to resolve something neatly, to fill every gap, to make every transition perfectly smooth.
Don’t do that. Reach for enlightenment. Accept that your first draft is going to have problems and issues. It’s going to need revision. Dissuade yourself from the incorrect belief that if you push yourself a bit more now, in the drafting stage, then your revision process will be smooth sailing and you’ll be done with the whole thing sooner—or maybe you won’t even need to revise.
You’re going to need to revise. It’s going to happen. The only way you will end up not needing to revise your manuscript is if you give up and don’t finish your manuscript. Finish that manuscript. Just start throwing trash into the gulf of the unknown until there’s so much trash piled up that you can waltz across. Listen, it’s fine. You can pick up your trash and replace your garbage bridge with a Millau Viaduct later on. The important thing is getting to the other side.
The Shelf Life marches ever onward, as does March, in fact. We’re at the 11th now, but I’ll be back after the midpoint, on the 16th. I hope you are looking forward to the second half of March—always the best half of March, in my opinion—because not only are there sunnier days ahead for you but there’s also a lot of great articles coming. I hope you will take the time to hit the subscribe button below so you don’t miss out.
If you have questions that you'd like to see answered in Shelf Life, ideas for topics that you'd like to explore, or feedback on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me. I would love to hear from you.
For more information about who I am, what I do, and, most important, what my dog looks like, please visit my website.
After you have read a few posts, if you find that you're enjoying Shelf Life, please recommend it to your word-oriented friends.
Just write the scenes that want to be written has worked for me. The missing pieces often pop into also wanting to be written, after I've done that.
When I get to something that's a roadblock like a name, place, or something I need to come back to later I just hit caps lock and type NAME01, PLACE01, or RESEARCHTHING. Keeps the flow, and is like a sticky note to come back when I edit.