Writer’s Block: Is it all Just Crap?

by +Denise Drespling

I might be unique in the world of writers. I do not believe in the existence of writer’s block. Oh, I know the days when you don’t want to write, or feel like you can’t, or the idea just isn’t right, or you’re so frustrated with your novel that your finger itches toward the delete button. But there’s one solution to the myth of writer’s block: write.

Write anything. It can be bad. It can be horrible. It can be completely irrelevant to what you should be working on, but you know what? If you’re writing something--an.y.thing--you’re not blocked. Don’t give in to the myth. Don’t let your fear tangle you up. Take your blank page and stuff it (full of words).

On an ironic side note, the day after I wrote this post, guess what I found in my inbox? Two emails from two separate writing blogs, both about writer’s block. Okay, universe, what are you trying to tell me? At first, I actually considered changing my post. I thought, maybe I’ve just been lucky and haven’t suffered from writer’s block. Maybe I’m not being sensitive enough to the dilemmas of my wordly cohorts. Then I read the posts.

Nope. Not a believer.

The thing is, they talked about issues like not having ideas, not being inspired, not having the energy, even having too many ideas to focus (I might suffer from that occasionally). They talked about great solutions: get exercise, use writing prompts, unplug, free write. I’m sure they all work well.

But here’s the thing. That’s not the same as not being able to write. That’s not being able to write well. So, let’s call it what it is. Not writer’s block. It’s writer’s sludge. It’s when all that comes to your mind is crap and all that comes out is crap. Hot, stinky, crap. Like a pile in the corner that the kitten just left. Oh, wait. No, that’s my living room. (Anyone want a kitten?)

Writer’s block, as most people refer to it, is just an excuse. Trust me. I’ve used it. It sounds much more important and sympathy-inspiring than to just admit, I don’t feel like it. If you’re having issues writing, you’re not blocked, you’re sludgy, and you don’t have to be.

Being in an MFA program is a different type of deadline than a publisher or employer breathing down your neck to get it done. It’s the difference between being paid for your writing and knowing that you’re paying for it. I’ve been in the place where I had an assignment of 15 pages due and the last thing I wanted to do was to jump into that world with those characters. But, I had to write, so I wrote something I hated. It was awful. All 15 pages will likely be trashed. I could have claimed I was blocked, but in reality, I was being lazy and bored.

The point is. Those crappy pages led me somewhere. They led me where I knew I didn’t want to go, but they also pointed me in a better direction. Even if you have a deadline where you can’t turn in crap, you can still write the crap first, then make it shine later.

Nora Roberts said, “You can fix anything but a blank page.”

Yup.

Write something, then visit the land of what ifs (which is, btw, also the name of my blog because that's where I spend my time):

Suppose there’s a man crossing the street. What if he trips? What if he bumps into a woman who is/turns out to be the love of his life? Or his ex who broke his heart? What if he found something on the ground? What if he realized he was on the wrong street? What if he got hit by a car?

See. That took me two seconds, but gave me infinite directions to take a story in. Depending on how far you are in your story, you won’t have quite as many options, but there are always options. Go play with them. Before you know it, you’ll have something worth keeping. And if it’s not worth keeping, you’ll know that, too.

Your thoughts? Do you see this, or am I just full of crap? ;)

Denise Drespling is the author of short story, “Reflections,” in the Tales of Mystery, Suspense & Terror anthology (October 2014) and “10 Items or Less,” in 10: Carlow’s MFA Anniversary Anthology (April 2014).

Hang out with Denise at her blog, The Land of What Ifs, or on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Goodreads, or Instagram.

Managing Expectations - Of Yourself!

I recently turned in the latest revision of my book to my editor, which means I now get to work on the next book. I opened that draft the other day and…yeah. It was not good. I’ll spare you the gory details, but suffice to say it was a bit of a shock after having just finishing a manuscript that was polished highly enough that I could see my face in the pages.

But then a funny thing happened. As I read through that draft, I found bits that weren’t so bad. Some were actually good. And even whole passages that I will definitely be keeping. In fact, I’m now just as excited about this second book as I was about the first. It obviously still needs tons of revision, but I’m anxious to dig in.

So what happened between “Oh-My-God-This-Is-Horrifying” to “Hey-I-Think-I-Just-Fell-In-Love-With-This-Book”?  It was the same book, but my expectations gradually shifted to something more reasonable than insta-perfection. I started out knowing what I can do with a book after many, many revisions--in other words, I set the bar WAY too high--so the reality of a first draft was a shock to the system.

But it was a necessary one.  I can’t beat myself up for not writing a perfect first draft. No one writes a perfect first draft. Everyone needs to revise in some way, shape, or form. Some books need more revision, some less, but every one of us starts off in the same place: the blank page.

The place to set that high bar is not on the first read through after drafting—it’s for when you’ve taken the time to put in the necessary work and make your book the best it can be. That could be the 2nd draft or the 20th draft; judging your work on the fact that you are making progress is a much better gauge than “Why-Isn’t-It-Perfect-Yet?” The latter will only leave you frustrated and likely depressed, but the former turns it into a positive thing.

How do you manage your expectations when you read through a draft? Share tips in the comments!

MarcyKate Connolly writes middle grade and young adult fiction and becomes a superhero when sufficiently caffeinated. When earthbound, she blogs at her website and spends far too much time babbling on Twitter. Her debut upper MG fantasy novel, MONSTROUS, will be out from HarperCollins Children's Books in Winter 2015.

Being Good Enough

by Riley Redgate

I used to run Cross Country in high school. As such, I can say with authority that it is a painful sport. If you don't feel terrible at some point during your run, odds are you're not running hard enough, or so the coach will tell you. "Pain is weakness leaving the body! Hrrrgh!"

And the fun thing about it is that it never gets easier. Soreness is part of the territory, no matter how fast or slow you are. If you run three straight 8-minute miles and you feel like you're going to drop dead afterward, great. Keep running hard, and maybe soon you'll be able to run three straight 7-minute miles. And then you'll have the privilege of ... still feeling like you're going to drop dead afterward.

Now, although writing rarely involves physical agony (erm, or so one would hope), the process is virtually the same. An eternal uphill battle. How so, you ask? Writers themselves are works in progress. We are never a finished product. We, and our writing styles, are always learning, evolving, transforming. We will always be able to improve, which is one of the reasons the process is so exciting. It's never the same thing twice.

The similarities don't end there. Most writers are constantly barraged with the pressure to measure their success by other people's reactions. Will agents like my book? they wonder. (Heck, will they even like my query letter?) How about publishers? How about reviewers? How about (gulp) the reading public at large?

But the most important question should always be, Do I like my own book? Just as a new PR (personal record) is the thing cross-country runners aim for, as writers, we should first aim for our best possible personal effort. I mean, let's be real: If every runner held him or herself to the standards of an Olympian, 1) there would be a hell of a lot more injuries out there, and 2) they would only ever feel bad about themselves.

I am not Tirunesh Dibaba, the 5k gold medalist. She is shorter than me, lighter than me, and built differently. I will never be her. I will never run three miles in fifteen minutes. Aspiring to be her is pointless. And similarly, writers can't poison their own mindsets by wanting nothing but to be the next Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Bill Shakespeare. That road leads nowhere—and it is a depressing one to run.

We've all heard Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Shakespeare are "great." But since we won't ever become them—since we can't measure how good we are by other people—how do we know when we're good enough? For each of us, what is "good enough"?

Well, achievement is not a spectrum or a sliding scale for all of humanity. Good enough is and always will be your personal best. Your life. Your PR.

Here's hoping you break your record!

Riley Redgate, enthusiast of all things YA, is a bookstore-and-Starbucks-dweller from North Carolina attending college in Ohio. She blogs here and speaks with considerably more brevity here.

(P.S. Sorry that this post is oddly late in the day, regular FTWA readers! I posted it in the wee hours of the morning and the Blogger gods promptly decided to consume it.)

Avoiding the Writer's Wall

by Stephen L. Duncan

In my fairly limited existence as an author, there have been many truisms that I’ve run across while trying to get the words onto the page. More often than not, these little bits of advice on the dos and the don’ts of being a writer get stuck somewhere in the back of my mind, only to be quickly forgotten. I'm just stupid like that. One, though, rings truer than others and I try to keep it in mind whenever a distraction attempts to call me away from the work.

Writing a novel is all about momentum.

You stick a word down, then another. Soon you have a sentence, and a paragraph follows until a page is filled. You do this over and over, and eventually you'll have all the pages your little spark of an idea needs to be a story.

That’s fairly simple, isn’t it?

Indeed. Yet there are always obstacles in our way. You’ve heard of one, no doubt. The dreaded Writer’s Block. I’ve never suffered from it, but it sounds horrible—a sort of frozen paralyzed state where words just don’t exist in the mind. Momentum can help prevent this little hiccup, because words are like water and a book, after all, is merely the result of a broken dam. The faster the flow, the harder it is to stop.

What I have experienced recently with the novel I just tuned in to my agent is the Writer’s Wall. If Writer’s Block is this leaded state of being that weighs you down, immobilizing you, Writer’s Wall is something you crash into.

In a way, it’s the opposite of Writer’s Block. You have too much going on in your writing life, too much spilling out of your head onto the page. And then, like something out of NASCAR, you hit the wall. (Hey, I’m from Alabama. I can only go so long in a day without a racing metaphor.) Your words are broken, not working, and your story seems futile. Worse, you're no longer certain you should be writing it.

The symptoms are these: From an abnormally confident valuation of your own work, often joined by a heightened productivity, you will experience a sudden onset of fear of publication characterized by a consuming doubt in your own taste and talent. Every word choice will be in question, every sentence’s worth made suspect. You will begin to negatively compare yourself to notable successful writers. While ideas and stories may flourish, you will encounter a paralyzing lack of esteem that prevents these ideas and stories from being realized.

A lot can steer you into a Writer’s Wall. Rejection. Negative feedback. Too much momentum. The list could go on and on. But the trick to pulling out of the crash is to take some time away from your work. Let it marinate in your head a little. Slow down. Live some of your life away from your computer.

Of course, if you’re like me, you might read this and then quickly store it in some recessed part of your mind, ready to be forgotten.

Write hard, y’all.

Stephen L. Duncan writes young adult fiction, including his debut, the first book in The Revelation Saga, due in 2014 from Medallion Press. You can find him blogging on INKROCK.com and on Twitter.

The Search for Writer's Block and Other Legendary Creations

by Matt Sinclair

I recently responded to a series of questions for a writer-friend's blog. If you've never done this before, I recommend it. You're often asked questions that you don't ask of yourself, and it's a good way to shake unused braincells around so ideas scatter as if they're in a snowglobe.

Surprisingly, the question that gave me pause was not the one about cupcakes, but rather the one about how I deal with writer's block.

Hmmm, writer's block. Um. Yeah. Uh, what's writer's block?

I know the term. I understand the concept. I believe it's real because others talk about it (kinda like Bigfoot, I suppose). But I don't get it. You've heard of that "fear of the blank page"? I treat it the same way one of my three-year-olds would: Get a crayon and scribble like hell!

I've read Stephen King's Bag of Bones, in which his lead character, a successful author (write what you know), finds himself unable to write after the death of his wife. Maybe that's writer's block—that feeling of "I won't do this any more." If I need to lose my wife in order to feel writer's block, I'll pass.

Now, I'm making a huge distinction here that needs to be addressed. I write and edit for a living. If I get writer's block, my kids don't eat. That's all the motivation I need, thank you. As a result, my fiction sometimes gets shunted. At the moment, it's not a budget line in my family revenue stream. Indeed, there's a big difference between whether a person is writing and whether the product is worth publishing. Some might argue that the question of whether unpublished writers get writer's block is the same as whether there's a sound when a tree falls without anyone to hear it. J.D. Salinger didn't suffer from writer's block. He just stopped seeking publication of what he wrote.

But many writers ask these questions of themselves because they feel that without writing, a part of their soul has crashed to the ground. And I totally get that.

Lately, I've been unable to jog. My legs still work, of course, but I've had other things that needed to be done and not enough time in which to do them. It gnaws at me, this stagnation. I often sit on the train thinking of how my physical inactivity is as unhealthy as my inadequate amounts of sleep (which I partially resolve by napping on the train). But I know I'll jog again. In a twisted way, it's kinda like what Mark Twain said about quitting smoking: It's the easiest thing in the world to do. I've done it several times.

You know how you change things? By doing. Cram a ten-minute writing session onto a piece of paper. It's not a novel, it's a scene, a vignette, a character sketch, nary more than an uncooked idea. It's the moment you just lived, turned into fiction and fantasy. It doesn't need to fit a genre. It just is. Every Wednesday for a few months now, I've been leading a little "writing cue" thread on AgentQuery Connect in which I toss out a few words, a vague and open setting, and say "Now write." There's no right or wrong. It's just about writing.

We're writers. Writing entails doing. Sure, as with any exercise regimen, you can get into bad habits, which is why it's always good to have a spotter (a future metaphor to develop...) But if you're serious about being a writer, write. You're the only one stopping you.

How do you deal with writer's block? Is it real to you? What does it mean to you; is it the same as living in an idea desert? How do you deal with the blank page?

Friday the 13th: Writing Tips, Tricks and Terrors

by Cat Woods

Friday the 13th has me in its clutches. I feel washed up, worn out and utterly brain dead. I'm terrified I won't write another good word—so much so, that Freddy could schlep on by with a hockey mask and a chainsaw and I wouldn't even flinch.

We writers spend all kinds of time biting our nails, pulling our hair, pickling ourselves with tequila and smashing our heads against our desks. We put oodles of pressure on ourselves to write better, faster and smarter. We fear the worst: that our words will never be seen past our crit groups and over-accommodating parents. That we will never have anything publishable. That if published, nobody will ever read our novels. Or love them. Or say good things about them. Or ... (insert 1001 ways we face our keyboard in terror every day) ...

Yet, we fail to realize that simply living the life of a writer is its very own Friday the 13th.

1. We don't back up our work properly and it gets eaten by the cyber monster.
2. We unwittingly spill coffee on our keyboards, attach cookies to our hard drives and open the door to viruses.
3. We forget to eat, drink or otherwise take care of ourselves, often being caught in our jammies and bed-head long after it's prudent.
4. We forget to feed, clothe and bathe our children/pets/significant others.
5. We neglect ourselves physically, allowing writer's spread to ooze off our chairs as we nibble chocolate and sip java.
6. We impose on our friends, neighbors and neighbors' friends to read our rough gems and can't understand why we get a) mindless back-pats, or b) dirty looks anytime we venture out in public.
7. We lose touch with reality and can't understand why nobody else has met our friends. Not to mention, it's kind of hard to teach our kids not to cavort with strangers when we've never met a single one of our writing buddies in person.
8. We edit too much, sucking the life out of our characters and the magic out of our stories.
9. We edit too little, leaving gaping plot holes for potential readers to fall through, never to be seen again.
10. We don't edit at all and believe our first drafts are magnificent. You poor editors and agents. Bless you and the work you do in wading through our delusions.
11. We wait for our muses to karate chop our writer's block instead of taking control and digging our own way out of Alcatraz with a plastic spork.
12. We wine ... er, whine ... all the dang time. Writers have it rough and we want everyone and their grandmas to know about it. And when whining doesn't work, we resort to wining.

Being a writer is terrifying. Honestly, it is.

Writers traditionally have a higher incidence of mental health issues. We spend time alone, in our made-up worlds, and garner little support from those around us. We sit for hours at a time in less than stellar settings. This wears on the body and the soul.

Don't believe me? Peruse the list of creative people who have suffered from some form of mental illness/mood disorder.

Patty Duke, Connie Francis, Peter Gabriel, Charles Haley, Kristy McNichols, Spike Mulligan, Abigail Padgett, Charley Pride, James Taylor, Mike Wallace, Kurt Cobain, Elton John, Sheryl Crow, Axl Rose, Ted Turner, Robin Williams, Winston Churchill, Princess Diana, Edgar Allan Poe, Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Dickens, Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Margaux Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Drew Carey, Judy Garland, Jim Bakker, Abraham Lincoln, Richard Nixon, and Virginia Woolf.

If that's not enough, consider the physical risks writers take every day. Deep Vein Thrombosis can occur in the lower extremities when individuals are inactive for long periods of time such as travel or sitting at a desk. Studies have shown that women who sit for extended periods of time are two to three times more likely to suffer from a pulmonary embolism than their more active peers.

And that's just the beginning of a long list.

So, the mother in me has a few words of advice for the writer in you.

1. Drink lots of water—tap water, occasionally, if you can stomach it. Filtered water and bottled water don't have fluoride. Likewise, sodas and creamers are high in sugar. When sipped all day, these sweet drinks add oodles of calories and lots of cavity potential.
2. Get up and stretch. Every hour or so, you should walk around. This will help keep your circulation going and minimize your risk of blood clots. It will also help alleviate muscle fatigue in your hands, wrists and back and keep your mind more alert.
3. Get out of the writing closet. Tell your family and friends. Share your blog and your progress. Don't bore peeps to tears with your every little writing drama, but be open to answering questions about your writing and don't be afraid to proudly proclaim, "I am a writer." It does wonders for the psyche and minimizes feelings of isolation.
4. Find a group of writerly types to learn from, support and be supported by. Learning insider info goes a long way in keeping us from making those premature submission mistakes. It also provides us with the know-how to be smarter, faster and better writers.
5. Take yourself seriously. You are a writer. You will write. You will research. You will edit. You will learn. You will query and query and query some more until you succeed. Maybe not with your first or third project, but that's okay. Writing is a process. You are the master.

So how about it, dear readers? Do you believe mental and physical health impact your ability to succeed as a writer? Conversely, in what ways does writing impact your health? How do you keep yourself in balance? What tips do you have for keeping your Friday the 13th writing terrors at bay?

Grab a spork and join the fun.