Post by wordy on Dec 4, 2010 15:42:59 GMT 10
Breaking The Block: Turning Anything Into Something
by kit
The blank page. It wants to get you. It sits there, framed by spine or by the various blue-white-green shades of your word-processor. It sits. It waits. Shimmers a little, perhaps, so that that even when you manage to drag words out of somewhere and they drip out onto your page, they don’t sit right. They’re clumsy. They’re disjointed or overworked and it’s easier to punctuate and re-punctuate different fragments than keep going with this content that isn’t artful, or ‘art’ that has nothing to say.
Ugh. Cross-out. Hit delete. Have a cup of tea. Do some research, perhaps! Yes. Obviously, nothing can be written until every last detail of your world has been fleshed out, and Wikipedia is really good for that...oh, look at what’s on television!
Sound familiar? Something like it might. Writer’s block is one of those things that, if you want to write, can’t be too foreign. For me, it sits in between all the good ideas and the exciting characters and the snatches of dialogue that I just want to laugh at and share with the world and say, “Can’t you see? Can’t you see what I did, there?” and it says, in its sneaky way, that any sustained writing is work. Even if you’re just writing for the sheer fandom fun of it, for no goal other than your own pleasure, or the enjoyment of your friends (and that, I think, is often the best sort of writing), writer’s block exists, and I’ve never any one who hasn’t had to work around it.
I am going to follow these three paragraphs of artful procrastination--and procrastination it was, when I first set out to write this article I found myself with no clue what to write--with some exercises I sometimes use to get through the block, but I am not claiming they are anything like definitive, or always helpful. They simply work off my belief, and it’s a very strong one, that the only way to get through writer’s block is to write. Words, once you hit a rhythm, beget more words. This is crucial. But also crucial is something that sounds contradictory to this:
Sometimes, when you’re blocked, you need to step away from your current project and write something else. And this is where prompts and writing exercises come in. This is where SMACKDOWN, glakers, brought me back into fandom--and into writing more generally: I’ve written more this year than I have in the past three, academic work excluded. The combination of an overall prompt--a character pairing--and a time constraint made it possible for me to churn out piece after piece after piece. Prompts can be that simple. And, even when they are not part of bloodthirsty competitions, they can bring you closer to other writers and readers in your fandom. This is why we have an official prompts board, of course, but you can also place your creative fate in the hands of one or two friends--ask someone to provide you with a word, a pairing, a word limit (always fun!) or style, and do your best to fulfil it. I offer myself up as a ‘fic slave’ on my LJ from time to time. I usually specify the fandom(s), and then leave the rest to chance...which is how I ended up writing a Harry Dresden/Monstrous Regiment (Terry Pratchett) crossover, but that’s a story for another day.
Now, some bullet ideas.
- Try writing a story that has every pair of words starting with the same letter. It’s a bizarre, unnatural state to put yourself in, but the extreme-stylisation allows me to simply concentrate on getting words out. Words that make sense. And it lets you really think about language for a space of time. Yes, perhaps after 100 words of that you’ll fling yourself away in disgust, but perhaps one bit of it will snatch at you, stick in your head, and you can go back to your original piece a little clearer, frustrations channelled into the other work. Someone might try completing this, in the comments:
Wyldon waited. Keeping Kel at a decent distance was wearisome when weighed—as aways, inevitably, it was—with holiday horrors. Crowds crushed him. Hapless stewards stood, shouted; seemed to tense, to triplicate themselves ten times and again, under unholy power of organisational skill. Clerks counted. He hated holidays.[/i]
- Try writing something that is all dialogue, or all narrative. You can pick the style you’re most comfortable with—for me that would dialogue, every time—or you can challenge yourself with your least favoured method of stringing words together.
- Time constraints, so long as they don’t set you mad, can be your friend. That’s what SMACKDOWN, or NaNoWriMo, or 31_days are good for. Signing up for a challenge such as these gives you the space to write, and a set end, so that you don’t feel like you’re staring into an infinite space of possibility that, while conceptually charming, can seriously overwhelm you. Don’t try and write anything. Try and write something.
If you’re working on a piece that you both desperately want to finish and are also sure you never want to see again, because the words just aren’t coming out right, and you’re not feeling inspired by other challenges, nor by ridiculous arbritary constraints on the starting letters of word pairs, then this is one simple thing I try, that does, sometimes, work. It’s what’s keeping Speculation, my longest fic to date, and by far my most sprawling, running along.
- In the same document as your piece of work, in a space that is clearly visible/accessible, write out the plan of what will happen—or what you think will happen—next. Now, some people do this naturally, and all the time, but I am not so fortunate. I am not a planner. I usually have an idea, ruminate on it for a couple of days (some people call this ‘mental drafting’ and it is apparently a recognised process, all I know is that I had a terrible time explaining to old teachers that no, I wasn’t going to submit rough drafts of my essays because no, I never wrote them) and then just let the word-flow take me where it will. This is a heady, fantastic, glorious experience...when it works. And it is an intimate re-acquaintance with the shimmering blank screen when it doesn’t. And, you know, for pieces over about 2,000 words? For me, mostly, it doesn’t.
- So, I plan. I don’t plan deeply. I just sketch out what timeline I know, what snatches of dialogue or description I really want to keep, even though I don’t know where, and I try and set out, in the vaguest and most elliptical of dot points, what is actually going to happen. This allows me to then skip from one section to another, to write something rather than anything or everything, because I know I have a guide for tucking any scene I create into its proper place later on. And, every time I open the document, I see that plan. Visibility is important.
If you’re going to write, you’re going to get blocked. Depressing as it is, I think that is one of the new inevitabilities here, and I hope this article has been semi-coherent. I hope no one wants to kill me for that awful first exercise. And I hope that anyone who hasn’t tried to prompt their block away with the help of other people might try and do so now. One of the best things about being in a fandom, about writing in a fandom, is that you are surrounded by other writers, and that these writers—be they planners or mental drafters, new or old, prolific or painstaking—can help you out. The blank page is always less overwhelming, when you can turn an unformed anything into something, after all.