Writing Rule #6: The Myth of Writer's Block

Feel free to disagree with me on this next one, but I believe "writer's block" is a crutch we use sometimes to explain why we're not working. Every single thing you write in a novel isn't going to feel like a magical experience.

That amazing feeling of inspiration can be addictive, but don't make the mistake of thinking that you can't write without it. Sometimes we have to muscle our way through a necessary scene to get to something we really want to write.

Sometimes, if you feel blocked, it's because you might be taking the wrong way. Whenever I feel like there's no more story to tell for the moment, I look at my plotting decisions and wonder if I've done something wrong. More often than not, I've made a decision that isn't right for my characters or that only serves to slow me down and doesn't actually move the plot forward.

So, taking that into account:

6.    There is no such thing as writer’s block. There are phases to writing.

a.    Inspiration
b.    Plateau
c.    Momentum
d.    Completion

This sounds really arrogant of me to say, but I promise it's true. Few people are able to just create prose at the drop of a hat, whenever they feel like it. For the rest of us, there are phases.

The above terms are something I developed when I was a sophomore in college. My junior year I took a class on the science of creativity. While I found the class to be more or less pointless, I was very surprised when the professor put up a four point list of the stages of creativity. His terms had more words like Incubation and Illumination, but the process was the same.

Better names for the same concept, which actually irritated me to no end. Here I thought I'd invented something unique only to find that they were teaching a class on it and had far better names for the same ideas.

However, this also goes to show that humans as a group have identified the same general process to all things creative, and writer's block, if you can to call it that, falls under one of these stages.

Inspiration is pretty clear. You get an idea. It's intoxicating and you can't wait to get it out. You write your heart out until the flame of inspiration as burned itself out and you feel like maybe it wasn't that great an idea after all. This is VERY normal, and it's ok. Because what you're brain is doing now is working beyond that first little glimmer of inspiration. I call that plateau, but I think incubation says it better.

This is when you stop thinking about what you're writing and instead focus on other things. Housework, yardwork, anything else. Your brain is working overtime right now, whether or not you know it. It could take a few hours, or a month. (Usually not much longer, though). But then, you go to step three.

Momentum is when your ideas come back to you. You might even have the entire novel dropped in your lap. You write at a less-fevered pace, but it's steady. Over days and weeks, you build your novel pages at a time. That is until you reach completion.

Completion is actually about the last 30 to 100 pages. It's different from momentum, because the end is now in sight. You sort of gear up and make a push not unlike the first stage of inspiration.

And then it's over, and you're done! (For the moment and not taking in account months you'll spend editing, which will probably take you longer than it did to write the book, because you'll get sick of your own stuff really quick, but then you'll feel really good about it again until you start to see all the things you did wrong, and then you get mad at yourself and....)

Well...there's no easy chart or rule set for what follows the fun bit of actually writing the book, which is why it's really important to do as many things thoroughly and properly the first time. It's a lot harder to fix it later.
Topics: Writing , Author , Novel , Authorship , Creativity , Stages of Creativity