I refuse to believe in "writer's block". Sadly, I'm also losing faith in the muse.
Contrary to circumstantial evidence, I am not dead. Or even somehow sidelined.
I am just struggling between my muse and my inner cynic, looking at the real world, getting me despondent and shooting down everything I write planning to post.
So far it's a stalemate. So I'm trying a workaround ;-)
I'm writing utterly disjointed bits that don't draw the attention of the 'inner cynic' because they don't seem related to anything concrete. My subversive hope is to grow each one out until they interconnect to the existing narrative and are fit for posting.
If this works, I hope to eventually have large portions of story to post.... since each is growing separately as scenes until I grow them enough to interconnect into the coherent narrative.
I refuse to believe in writer's block, so I am trying to trick my inner censor into letting me bang out something seemingly unrelated until I can fuse them together before the inner censor can drop the hammer.
So far I'm banging out a lot of incoherent (but hopefully useable/fuseable) stuff. I refuse to accept 'the block' so I will try to subvert my way around.
How do YOU deal with 'writers block' ...or being 'ditched by the muse'?
K@
Comments
Do something completely different
don't even think about writing.
The more you worry about it, the more the block stays in place.
Then at sometime in the future you will start to think about a storyline again. Something as trivial as a song could trigger your muse to end its slumbers.
Samantha
My way or the highway? No way!
My ways of dealing with acute lack of writiness is most likely not something that suits everyone.
As to writing fiction I find that the higher the pressure I put on myself, the less ideas I come up with. For example for some of the contests here I have considered entering but since I had no idea ...
Thankfully I'm not a professional writer with dead-lines and I only write (short) one-off stories so I don't feel any pressure to churn out a new chapter. I can afford to lean back and relax until my muse returns on her own volition (leaving a piece of chocolate next to printer helps. I have found strawberry filling most effective). All attempts to build a better Muse trap have failed so far though.
Your way sounds very intriguing. I can imagine that a number of zany (in a positive way, I just love zaniness) pieces to stitch together can either be extremely fun or terribly vexatious. Either way the result could be very interesting. Whenever it comes and in whaterver form it takes I'm looking forward to reading it. (Oops, I just may have added to pressure on you. Not my intention though)
If everthing else fails we alwasy have the brute force option: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battering_ram.
Remember that this is a friendly site (well, mostly) and if we don't always live up to our own expectations we are not as harshly judged as we judge ourselves.
Bru
the dredded block
I can only speak from my own experience, but to me writer's block is indicative of another problem.
For me it either means I've taken a story in the wrong direction and I need to go back and figure out where I went wrong and change it or I've lost interest in the story and need to take a break from it.
Have a delightfully devious day,
Why not try editing someone
Why not try editing someone else's work for a while? It'll still keep you writing, so to say, but there's no real pressure involved.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Just found another trick
Have something else that you really, really should do but really, really don't want to do.
Channeling into comments right now
Bru
I have been searching for the
I have been searching for the proverbial writers C4 for a long time and have yet to come up with anything that really works
Don't try to force it.
Write something else. Many professional authors have stories ideas they can't tell yet. Why should you be any different? Put the pieces of this story away for now. Maybe you'll see a way to use it in something else, Maybe something you see or hear will suddenly the give you key to the story in a year or two. I have read prefaces were an author talks about writing a novel in a couple of weeks that had been abandoned for years. Something gives them the scene or the additional character or whatever to make it work. That doesn't mean giving up on the story; your just doing life as research.
Tricks
Try writing something very different. Non-transgender, and of a kind you never tried or even liked to.
Think about outsourcing a half-finished project to someone blatantly incapable of writing. (If nobody else comes to mind, think about me. :) )
Recall the last scene of a half-finished project, set it in your head and leave the characters do whatever they like. (And be ready to accept their decisions. Yeah, I know it sounds crazy. Just try it.)
Talk with fellow writers about writing. Do that a lot - hours per day, many days. Have some beer (or another favorite drink) to grease the exchange. Add whatever makes the chosen drink taste best to you. And while at that, have a notepad and pencil at hand.
:)