Imagine Your Way Out of Writer's Block

There’s much to enjoy about being a writer, much more than there is to not enjoy about being one, but if there’s one thing writers enjoy the least, it’s writers block (he says, stepping away from the screen for a few minutes because the next sentence is refusing to come). I spent a previous entry discussing a serious bout of writer’s block I recently experienced and how I managed to overcome it. But writer’s block is a creature of many faces. In its most gruesome form, it disables the writer completely and words flow to the page like juice hand-squeezed from a stone. And then there’s its less sinister cousins that detonate in the middle of the page, leaving gaps in the narrative. It’s these little buggers that I want to talk about today, and how I try to deal with them.

One thing to remember about these little spots of writer’s block is that each one of them aspires to become the eldritch horror that consumes your entire craft. They feast on your confidence, and grow as it shrinks. The inability to complete a sentence can grow into the inability to finish a chapter. With an unfinished chapter you begin to question whether your work will ever be completed. And if this work, which you’ve planned for years and written for months, needs to go into the dustbin, then perhaps you were never cut out to be a writer and your father was right, you should go back to school and get an MBA and spend the rest of your life drinking tepid water from the cooler because the AC wreaks havoc on your throat. Sound familiar? Then I feel for you.
There are ways, however, of reducing the chances that the little bastards will achieve their goals, and I want to set out a few of them below:

1. CUT YOUR LOSSES

Ideally, your writing simply flows and you don’t have to put much thought into what comes next. In practice, there are plenty of reasons to pause: finding the next word, phrase or thought, or perhaps finding that what you’ve just written sounded much better in your head. That’s fine. But sometimes these pauses swell.

You know your writing better than anyone, so you’re the best judge of when a normal pause turns into something more. You can feel the doubt start creeping in and wondering why you’re not able to conclude such a seemingly simple thought.

So my advice is to step away as soon as you can. Don’t let the little snag become something bigger than it needs to be. Go for a walk, get a drink of water, find something else to do however brief or however long. Just let your brain step away from the conscious cycling through a problem that leads to a distorted emphasis on the problem, and let your subconscious brain take over and focus on a solution.

You’d be surprised how many of these mini-blocks can be dislodged by diverting your attention elsewhere, and you could do something useful in the meantime instead of staring at a computer screen or a piece of paper.

The next two strategies take a similar approach, but maintain emphasis on your writing.

2. WRITE SOMETHING ELSE

This is why I find it useful to have several projects on the go (including this blog, because if anything allows for an unmitigated stream of consciousness rant, it’s a blog entry, so, I’m sorry, I guess?). I can always unplug myself from one project and work on the other. And sometimes these shifts last weeks if not months. But the result is that if you do happen to lose your infatuation with a particular project, it doesn’t turn into a tragedy, because you have something else to nourish in the meantime.

I’m aware that some would argue that this leads to jumping from one project to the next without anything crossing the finish line. These “completionists” think a project has to be seen to its bitter end no matter what toll it takes. And while there is merit in occasionally finishing a project, because a finished project is an entirely different learning experience than just writing parts of one, it presumes that this strategy means nothing will get done. It does get done, but slowly. Ultimately you’re the best judge of what works for you, so if you think you’re the kind of person that will just get distracted by the next shiny new thing, perhaps this one isn’t for you.

3. LEAVE GAPS

This is basically the same as the previous strategy, but instead of having to look outside of the current work, you look inside it. The jumps could be as big as working on another chapter at a completely different part of the novel, or it could be working on the next paragraph while the previous one sits unfinished.

Oftentimes, I have a general sense of how a scene is going to go and all the little interactions, actions and descriptions that will form it. However, sometimes transitioning from one to the other can be a challenge. So if I ever get into trouble and a transition is not immediately forthcoming, I just skip right over to the next little bit and I continue. Coming back even fifteen minutes later might be enough to tie the two portions together, or sometimes I have to sleep on it and the transition comes so smoothly that I’m surprised it gave me trouble to begin with. I find it much easier to drop a tricky line and come back to it later than to puzzle it out and force a solution.

4. IMAGINE YOUR WAY OUT

This is a mental trick I’ve used that is not always successful, but when it works, it feels a little bit like magic. I find it more suitable for stubborn sentences than whole paragraphs, but if you find that this works for you, I would be curious to hear your success stories.

So whenever I encounter a sentence that for whatever reason I’m not able to complete, I try to imagine what comes next. Sounds stupid, right? Like, what the hell are you doing with your writing if you’re not imagining it? But I’m not talking about imagining a scene. I’m talking about imagining the writing itself.

I try to put myself in a specific state of mind where I try to picture myself reading a book that I’m really enjoying, but not a real book that I’ve already read. This is a great book by an excellent author and I’m enjoying reading it because it’s one of those works that I just wish I’d written myself. And so once I have this little scene laid out in my head, I read the last couple of sentences that I wrote before the snag, and then once I reach it, I let go, and allow my mind to picture the words or the sentences that would come next.

What would I expect of a high-quality work?

It doesn’t always work, or sometimes it needs a couple of false starts to work, but when it does, oh man, like I said, it’s magic. It feels as though some other part of my brain tells me to step aside, takes over, and shows me what is to write well. Of course, it was me all along, but imagining already completed writing takes the edge of the stress of conjuring something into existence. It also you to treat the writing as already there, and you’re merely showing it to yourself.

I would recommend to everyone to try this for yourselves because this has helped me imagine my way out of writer’s block on more than one occasion.


So there it is, hopefully you’re able to integrate one or all of these strategies into your writing and remember, don’t accept that writing is suffering and wherever you can, try to find the joy.