Hello and welcome to the Casual Chat!

Like I said in the Weekly Round-Up, this week’s Casual Chat was going to be an off topic one, and I was trying to figure out what to write about. There were a plethora of topic that I could choose from, but nothing really materialized.

It wasn’t until I had opened up to start writing this post when I realized that there was something that I could write about, and it’s something that I am very familiar with.

Writer’s Block, the two dreaded words that writers of all skill levels have to deal with at some point in their lives and have different ways of dealing with it.

I decided that I wanted to talk about Writer’s Block, what it is, how it’s affected me, and how I have dealt with it over the years.

What is Writer’s Block?

Writer’s Block is, put simply, the inability for a writer to write. Usually writer’s block isn’t often caused by sickness or outside factor, but is often attributed to something internally causing issues for the writer.

This can range from the lack of ideas and inspiration to actual anxiety and depression for how the work is going to be perceived by others.

Writer’s Block has been a phenomena that’s been known about, at least from a quick Google search, since at least the 18th century and has been studied actively since the late 40’s.

Personal Stories of the Block

Here is a fun fact for people, and something that I just realized after doing a quick bit of digging: I have been writing on and off for 15 years.

That is a huge chunk of my life that has been dedicated to writing. There were points in time where I wasn’t writing at all, or writing consistently, but I was always drawn back to it in some manner.

When I first started writing I was a machine. I would write something every day and post it on an undisclosed website fairly consistently. It was all bad, purely because when I started off I was in high school and had no real concept of what makes something interesting to read.

I had people who enjoyed what I had written, and over time my style would evolve and change, and with that my output had also changed.

I went from posting something every day or every other day to once a week, to once a month, to once a year, to once every couple of years.

Now there were several factors to this, some of which are very personal, but one is that I was pursuing a college degree that I did not enjoy and was going through a major period of self doubt.

I didn’t like what I was doing and was feeling like a failure, which caused a lack of motivation and a lack of me writing.

Over time and personal healing, I started writing more and more often, slowly improving and using what I had learned to craft better works.

This would eventually lead me to having the bright idea to start a daily blog series where I talk about Magic: The Gathering and here we are. The question then becomes this: other than what I did in my personal life to help myself, what did I do to deal with the Writer’s Block?

Breaking the Block

There are a couple of personal techniques that I have used to deal with Writer’s Block. Let me preface by saying that these methods are not perfect and may not work for everyone. They have worked for me in the past and today, which is why I’m sharing them, and they may work for any fledgling writers out there.

The first method I have is to stop what I’m working on and do something else entirely. This is advice that is commonly thrown around, but let me explain how I go about it.

Say I am writing a science fiction story and am stuck on something. Naturally I want to get ideas to proceed with the story and it would make sense to watch science fiction things to help, right?

Incorrect. I would go and watch things that involved fantasy, or cooking shows, or goofy cartoons. Anything that would distract me from science fiction. Why is that the case? Well the reason for that is that when I have my mind focused on one thing, it becomes a hallway.

I get tunnel vision and only begin to imagine solutions while in that tunnel, causing me to get stressed and frustrated. If I go the opposite direction, and not think about what I am writing about, then my mind occupies different areas and a solution will come from it.

Going back to the science fiction example, if I happen to watch a pirate movie or something involving boats and see how pirates interact with civilians, I may get inspiration for a plot line that can help connect one story beat to another using space pirates.

In a similar vein, another way that I use to get through Writer’s Block is to actually work on another project. Being a creative person usually means that there are a ton of projects that are being worked on, all of them in different stages of completion.

I have been wanting to work on a long form book for years, but I could never decide on a genre I was comfortable with to get working. I then decided to put some of those writing projects down and try a different genre than I am used to.

Suddenly I have a nearly 9000 word short story when I have struggled to get 500 words into a cohesive opening. That work is never going to see the light of day, but it was really motivating for me to attempt a few genre switches to get some more writing practice in before I commit to an actual book.

The last technique that I have used to help Writer’s Block is something that is more unorthodox, but has worked for me on occasions when I am in a serious Writer’s Block: brute force the work then delete it.

What do I mean by brute force? I mean that even in the throes of a bad idea or plot point, you continue on and when you feel like it is finished, read it over then delete it.

The reason why this works for me is as a way to get all the “bad ideas” out and to filter out the good ideas that I can extract from them. When I have an idea of what I can salvage, I write the new version of what I previously wrote and repeat the process as many times as I need.

Is it time consuming? Yes. Is it counter productive? Absolutely. Does it help get me to focus on what a story needs? Yes it does.

Now I don’t do this with whole drafts, but chapters or parts of chapters, because if I did it with a whole book then I would have been better off sending it to an editor to fix.

Doing it in small sections can help me pinpoint the best parts of my story so that as I proceed forward, I have a better idea on what to focus on.

In Conclusion

As I said earlier, I am not an expert on what can break Writer’s Block. I know what works for me, and am constantly working to find even more effective methods.

There is no perfect way to break Writer’s Block, but there are plenty of ways that can make dealing with it much easier.

If I was able to help a new writer in managing their Writer’s Block then I’m happy and if I don’t I’m not too stressed about it. At the very least I was able to find something that I think was interesting to talk about.

Thank you for reading, see you all next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual