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.