More Useless Ideas

I made an offhand comment last month that I’d list a few methods for curing writer’s block that don’t work. I started to have second thoughts when I sat down to do that. Why would I write about things that aren’t helpful? That sounds very… not helpful.

Then I remembered that quote about not failing 100 times but finding 100 ways not to do something. Maybe my list can shorten the number of times someone else doesn’t fail.

1) I already covered freewriting.

2) Trying to write in a new environment has been suggested. Think about this for a minute. This advice basically says, if you’re having trouble concentrating on your project, go look for distractions. If your familiar quiet room isn’t working for you, try to write at a restaurant where people will be banging and chattering in the kitchen, or at a public park where strangers will think the fact that you’re staring at a notebook means you’d like to talk about the weather. That’s wonderful for concentration.

3) I’ve seen more than one list of ideas that includes drinking coffee. There are two types of people in the world: those who don’t drink coffee and those who already drink too much. More coffee is unlikely to make a difference for the latter and sounds like a hassle to the former, who don’t have it in the house and probably don’t like it anyway. Unless you want to write authentically about following bad advice, skip the coffee solution.

4) Some people say writing prompts are a good idea. I don’t completely disagree. These can be useful in a general sense. Trying to write about different settings, emotions and actions can help stretch and strengthen the writing muscles. But it doesn’t help when a specific part of your story isn’t working. You can think of ten different ways someone might react to a bad Christmas present, and none of them will get your spaceship off the ground.

5) One of my favorite pieces of advice is to try to think out loud. This goes back to the coffee thing where there are only two types of people. There are normal people, and there are people who don’t need this suggestion. Anyone who hasn’t figured out that talking to yourself is a great way to accomplish many tasks, including sorting out the dialog or direction of a story, is unlikely to be convinced by some random person putting it on a list.

I guess this random person probably shouldn’t be making lists either. I’ll go back to talking to myself. I mean, I’ll go back to writing a story.

The Best Cure

This month I’m going to offer amazing and totally serious advice for aspiring writers who might be facing the dreaded blank page.  Draw on the wall.  This might turn out to be metaphorical depending on whether or not you have any drawing talent and who owns your wall. 

Let me back up to explain.  I’ve been doing this writing thing long enough that I’ve had to break through a lot of blocks.  I’ve read a fair amount of advice, and I know what works and what doesn’t.  The most important place to start on this topic is to be clear that there are two very distinct types of writer’s block.  Type 1 is I love writing and I’m trying to create a story I’m excited about and I just don’t know what’s going to happen right here.  And then type 2 is I have to write a paper for school on this subject I don’t care about or I’m trying to write a memo to the boss where I call him an idiot without calling him an idiot.  I’m only an expert on type 1.

At the top of the list of things that don’t work is freewriting.  This is a “technique” where you just write without caring if it’s good or even makes sense.  This advice makes no sense.  If I could write something, I wouldn’t be stuck.  I already expect to go back and improve my story.  That’s called editing.  Maybe this advice is only meant for those poor type 2 people.

I’ll go over some of the other bad advice next month so I can move on to what does work.  Take a break from writing to do something fun.  But not just anything fun, it has to be something you do poorly.  I decided to paint a picture on my wall.  Now the problem I’m struggling with isn’t that my main character got roasted and has no comeback.  The new problem is that my drawing of a boat looks like a banana with a piece of toast stuck in it.  That first problem suddenly seems easier to fix.  When I’m trying to puzzle out how to paint a white dove on a white wall, I’m also daydreaming about where my characters are going to go on a first date.  The more times I erase something on the wall, the more confident I am that my book will be much better, and I can’t wait to get back to writing it.

I promise this is good advice for everyone.  Even if it doesn’t resolve your immediate block, you still get to do something fun.  Plus, it will almost certainly prove useful in a future project where you can write realistically about a character dropping an open can of paint down the stairs. 

Permission to Keep Writing Whatever I Want

I thought I had a great plan for writing my blog post this month.  I had scheduled several hours of sitting in a hospital waiting room.  (No worries, everything went smoothly.)  It seemed as though being trapped in a quiet room with nothing else to do would be the perfect place to knock out a few thoughts on writing.

Somewhere, someone who has spent time in a hospital waiting room is already laughing at my plan.

What was the problem?  It was only mostly quiet.  If the waiting room had been crowded, I could have easily tuned out the hum of overlapping voices.  I only heard one voice at a time though.  It wasn’t the same voice, only the same type of voice, the kind that doesn’t care if everyone around it hears every word. 

I have the type of brain that starts spinning on whatever input it’s forced to receive, even when it’s supposed to be ignoring the intermittent loud voices to write about writing.  I wasn’t listening when one woman told another about her visit to a shop run by Mennonites.  I still heard her friend ask, “What’s a Mennonite?”  My brain took the time to wonder how this second woman got to be 70 or so without ever hearing of Mennonites.  My brain kept spinning as the first woman tried to explain that they are sort of like “those other people.  It starts with an A.”  The second woman immediately guessed, “Agricultural People?”

I was still trying to write about writing, but my brain completely stalled out at that point.  It thought that guess was super strange.  It also worried that if someone nearby could read my thoughts, would he be wondering how I got to be 70 or so without ever hearing of Agricultural People?  I know I’m still more than two decades from turning 70.  My brain knows I’ve been offered a senior discount in my 40s too often to count and couldn’t rule out the possibility I was way off on my guess of the other woman’s age.  It was a little mean of my brain to remind me of that.

I tried to focus on something about writing.

Another female voice loudly proclaimed that she’d never forget the best pizza she’d ever had.  She said it was covered in a pile of cheese, which she’d never cared for much.  This confused my brain for a couple of obvious reasons.  The woman’s friend, for some unfathomable reason, skipped the comment about liking something covered in something she didn’t like and only wanted to know about the crust.  She asked if it was crispy or soft in the middle.  Was it thick or thin?  Could you fold it?  The first woman couldn’t seem to remember anything about the crust.  My brain was still spinning back to the start of the conversation I was trying not to hear when a phone rang.

It was a cell but with a very old-fashioned ring.  This was fortunate.  If it had sounded like anything else, I might have thought it was the fire alarm.  I jumped so bad I momentarily levitated.  When the old dude casually pulled it from his pocket on the third ring like it wasn’t the most jarring thing he’d heard in days, I suspected he was hard of hearing.  I was therefore not surprised when he answered the phone by yelling into it.  I was surprised when the first words out of his mouth were, “I’m doing pretty good.  I went to a funeral yesterday.”  My brain fought hard not to laugh at something that wasn’t remotely funny.  Maybe I could have thought about writing if he had simply paused long enough to take a breath between those two sentences. 

I didn’t get to write anything in all the hours I spent in the waiting room.  But I did leave with assurance that real people will always be weirder than anyone I put in my books.  Especially that one who refers to her brain as though it’s a separate entity.