Do you ever get Writer’s Block?
This is a writer on writing. Something I could write a lot about.
Everyone should write, even just a few words to describe where you are. Leave yourself a trail you can sniff out in the future. Time travelling backwards is fun!
I am closing in on the biggest writing month I’ve had since November 2022, when I started the Spirit Foul rough draft. I am working on a novel, but that’s not what I am writing about. How does one write 50,000 words in a single month? The Process, and, you guessed it: lots and lots of coffee.
One day I will publish my love letter to coffee. What a long letter it will be. Again, not for today.
The Process. I don’t actually call it that. The first time I thought about it was titling this post. But it is a process. How do I write so much? Some days I really have to force myself to. For some reason, much like exercise, my brain is wired to LOVE doing nothing productive and FORGET how much I love writing and running. If I do nothing, I am temporarily satisfied with that, before the tumbling guilt of doing nothing weighs on me like depression and anxiety; heavy blankets of immobility. But, ugh, the blank page!
When I tell the barber, or bartender, or dental hygienist, that I am a writer, every Tom Dick Harry Dorothy Samantha asks me about writer’s block. Without fail. Don’t mistake this as a complaint, I don’t mind talking about it. In fact it seems like a grand thing to talk about.
I turn up my nose like a persnickety artist, “Well actually, I don’t BELIEVE in writer’s block.” They immediately regret asking.
Get to work
I end up seeking a lot of writing advice. I don’t have a writing group, and sometimes I feel like I really need one. Instead I turn to lectures and books and interviews with authors. The advice I like the best is to treat it like work. Show up. Start working. That’s it, really. The first sentence is almost never good. Sometimes the second sucks, too. But like running, once I get some momentum under me, and the distractions fade, and my mind becomes absorbed in the thing, I am running free.
As an aside, my language is word count. The average reader takes in 300 words/ min. 3,000 (3k) words would take the average bear 10 mins to read. Accepted average writing pace is something like 500-1000 words per hour. What you could read in 3 minutes takes about an hour to write, depending on the day.
Some days I tell Grace things like “I got 2k words in, but it was mud trudging.” I encourage myself to try and be as proud of those days as I am of, say, last Wednesday. I wrote 3.5k words in a blink, an unbelievable pace.
Is this the proverbial muse at play? Sure, why not. But luck favors the prepared, and the muse striketh on her own schedule, not mine. If I sat around and waited until ideal conditions, I would never have written a book, and would certainly not write another. That’s just a fact. Sometimes I sit down with a shit shovel and bash my head against the wall before I really connect and lose myself in the story. Some days I sit and wince all morning, feeling like I am incapable of doing the work.
The process. It is much easier to edit words that exist than it is to write new prose. My rough drafts are rough. The bad days need more emotion, the good days need less pretentiousness. But the feeling I have when writing a passage is rarely indicative of the writing quality itself. I’m just speaking my truths here. It’s not always obvious when I read it back which days sucked and which days I considered myself a master of my craft. That’s comforting to someone that just needs to convince himself to sit down and write.
I warm up with a journal entry so I can write things like “I’m feeling reluctant today. The walls are blue. My foot hurts. The dog is barking at nothing.” I ramp myself up a bit. Sometimes I’ve caught myself procrastinating in my journal. Writing nonsense to avoid returning to the actual work of losing myself in the story.
I spoke in my Quick Things post about being a little directionless. This is the closest I’ve felt to legit writer’s block. Not because I couldn’t write, because I couldn’t figure out what to write. I tell myself that not wanting to sit and write is just being lazy, not being blocked by some imaginary force. I recognize in myself that I often need a kick in the ass. I balance this by trying to be proud of getting words in despite feeling immense resistance.
This isn’t much different than doing anything.
Handwriting vs Typing
On typing vs “long form” handwriting. Many folks, particularly the old school writers, talk about needing the long form as part of their process. The feeling of pen on paper is romantic. It isn’t permanent, it doesn’t feel to them like it needs to be perfect. I respect that. I’ve tried it. I understand the appeal, but it isn’t for me, for several reasons. I still keep journals and use them more than someone that doesn’t practice. But for prose, I gotta have a keyboard.
One, I don’t have an issue with a typed word feeling permanent. I’ve grown up with computers, and I’ve typed hundreds of thousands of sentences that suck ass on computers. I have no problem making the text red and commenting “this is useless.” Two, speed. My hand writing cannot even come close to my thinking speed. I feel writing by hand slows me down. I can pretty much type as fast as I think, or at least slow my mind down a tad to typing speed. I don’t feel like I lose thoughts nearly as much as when I’m handwriting. I can lose entire ideas two, three sentences away when I’m trying to scribble coherent letters. Three, transcribing. I’ve transcribed a fair amount and I hate it. The appeal of the long form writer is that you edit the handwriting while you type. But now my typing is slower! I have to read, change, edit, blah blah while transcribing. There’s too much time to overthink.
The Coffee Shop trope
We have a local coffee shop. An eclectic gathering spot for students, professionals, weirdos and everyone in between. A real artist’s oasis. I’ve thought of it many times as a Room of Requirement (Harry Potter). When The Cranberries come on over the radio and I’m sipping my cheap black coffee at an unbalanced table surrounded by locals chatting, or working so hard that steam seems to drift off their heads, I think to myself “This is what I needed.”
I am a character trope. I am the writer in the coffee shop. Ugh. How terribly predictable. The rebel in me seethes like a demon to holy water.
There is certainly something to be said about changing your environment. I sit down and turn off my wifi and suddenly there is nothing to do but write. The words come quicker. I get it. It really works. And I love my local coffee shop. I would plug them but I know how many thousands of eyes will read this, and I’d hate to be swarmed by my fans during my bountiful writing bouts. (Editor Zack, do I explain that I say this in jest? Or is that clear?)
Time of Day
I really hate to put myself in a box. I strive to be the person that finds a spare twenty minutes and cranks out part of a scene. But practically, I am much more prolific in the morning. It is most acceptable to drink a pot of coffee in the morning. This is also conducive to bartending.
I need to be more flexible with a baby on the way, so I have before, and I will in the future, sit down in the afternoon to work. I need to. Life is not so easy (yet) that I may cater my schedule to include a few hours each morning to write.
Maybe that’s all I have to say on writing this morning. That’s probably too much, anyway.
While I don’t publish nearly as much as I write, rest assured that I’m still bent over the keyboard mashing keys (nearly) every day. It’s great, and I think it is what I am meant to do.
Z <3