As all writers do
at some point in their life, I have been struggling with some blockage as of
late. It’s a little different for everybody; for me, writer’s block manifests
as a lack of specific motivation. I want
to want to write, and I have many ideas and many projects in a
partially-completed status, but I have a hard time making myself sit down and
get anything done.
I have had some
success with what I call the Forced Creativity method, where I make myself
write a few pages, even if I do later decide that it’s all uninspired garbage.
The theory behind this method is best described—by Mercedes Lackey, I think1—with
the reasoning that if you want writing to be your job, you have to treat it
like a job. I.e., spend the majority of your day at it. And it would seem to
work, since Ms. Lackey has written somewhere in the neighborhood of one
bajillion novels2.
On the other
hand, some of us have to work real jobs to make money to live on, since writing
has so far netted us precisely zero dollars3. So spending forty
hours a week working and forty hours a week writing while actually sleeping and
maintaining my house and marriage seems rather unlikely barring any kind of
time-compression device4.
However, as far
as amateur-to-amateur advice goes, Forced Creativity is great when you’re the
type of writer who never gets anything done because you spend all your time
revising and rewriting the same chapter eleventy-thousand times until it is
perfect. I used to be one of those writers, and finally broke myself of the
habit with this simple mantra: there will always be rewrites. No matter what, I
will always end up going back and tweaking things. So I might as well just
forge ahead, finish the damn thing, and then edit the hell out of it later.
Finally, I might
suggest trying to get done at least a page a day. Especially if you’re working
on a novel, because then you’ll have a book done within the space of a year. And
that is a good rate for just about any writer5.
1 At least, I think it was her. If I had actually
done the legwork to look it up and confirm it, I would then be using this
footnote to cite my source, like a good lil’ English major.
2 Some of them involving elves driving racecars.
No, really.
3 Negative dollars, really, if you count the cost
of printing and mailing rejected manuscripts.
4 Of course, if I did have such a device, then the
Doctor would likely show up to stop me because I was meddling in cosmic forces
I don’t understand. Then my wife would run off with him, which would free up some of my time…
5 Unless you’re Mercedes Lackey.
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