December Experiment: Writer's Block (Patreon)

Attack the Block: Writer’s Block, Easy Answers, and Hard Truths

Greetings from the Lab! It has been a roller coaster of a 2018 here, full of developments I can’t actually tell you about yet, but which have sufficiently knocked me on my hindquarters that I barely noticed the completely miserable bomb cyclone blizzard thing until my heating bill came. The sentient boiler under the stairs is laughing at me right now. I can hear it. It sounds like gargling dollar bills. Also I lost my winter boots somehow. It’s a whole country song up in here, and today it’s raining crazy hard so the snow is going to disappear and leave us with only the dregs of winter, when it’s just wet and brown and grey and mocks the idea of happiness until the snow or spring comes again. 

NEW ENGLAND, AM I RIGHT?

Given the screeching halt that progress on my book came to in the last two weeks because Life insisted on Happening at me, I thought we might talk about writer’s block this month.

Writer’s block is one of those things that authors get asked about a lot. Or maybe it’s just me. I get asked about writer’s block a lot. Because I’ve written a pretty stupid amount of books in a reasonably short (in terms of like, one adult human life span and average length of a career in publishing) amount of time, people seem to think that I have a secret vaccine or spell or large plasma gun that keeps writer’s block locked out and making puppy faces at a rainy window. 

I have a very pat, rehearsed answer to this question. And I’ll share that answer in a moment. And then I’ll tell you the truth. Because honestly, I hate this question. To me, it’s like the 1979 penny at the end of Somewhere in Time. If I look to closely at that question, it might hurt me. It might suck me into a whirling vortex of self-doubt and blank pages. It’s the friendly convention equivalent of someone walking over my grave. 

Because look, that blank page is there for all of us. That terrible, hateful, sneering blinking cursor is the great equalizer. It is the same for you as it is for the greats, and it mocks us all in kind. What we do as writers is a bizarre kind of magic trick/ritual dance we have no idea how we pulled off in the first plaec and live in fear that some day we’ll wake up and the rabbit and the hat and the dancefloor and the feathered boad will all be gone, as mysteriously as they appeared. I have written thirty-eight books and I am here to tell you, when I start a new one, I feel like a golden retriever who’s been ordered to do calculus. It feels like I’ve never written anything before, or read anything, or even briefly encountered the English language. A book is an intimidating thing, and the first blank page is basically like fighting the end boss the minute you boot up a game. 

So here’s my practiced answer, designed to be as helpful as possible without spreading my guts out on the panel table.

When you’re a professional writer, and you keep the lights on (barely) using a clever combination of literature, social media, and sheer foolishness, writer’s block is no longer a luxury you can afford. Sure, you still get stuck, but you can’t just get blocked and stay there, because they will turn off your water. So you develop some techniques—switch to another project for a bit, or take a long walk, a shower, do something—anything—other than write for awhile until something shakes loose. Give yourself space to think and play. It took me four days to figure out how to pull off the last act of Deathless, and if I’d have just pushed through, I never would have come up with one of my favorite parts of the book. While stuck on the fourth Fairyland book, I played through Mass Effect, which led directly to me writing a book in that universe. There is serendipity to be had in writer’s block and in procrastination. Forgive yourself, distract yourself, trust yourself, and it’ll come right.

It’s not that this isn’t true. It’s not that it isn’t the correct advice. It’s not even that I don’t stand by it and believe it’s absolutely the right thing for new writers to hear.

But it’s a real fucking Pollyanna version of the truth.

It happens. It happens to me. It happens to George Martin. It happens to nearly everyone. Sometimes, we all get hyped up for the big performance only to dig deep and find there’s nothing there, we fumble and apologize but the cursor don’t care. It happens to some more than others, but eventually, it does happen to all of us and it is the motherfucking worst. On like, an existential level. And you can take all the long walks and showers you want but sometimes, sometimes, that won’t do shit to fix it. It is the long dark midnight refrigerator raid of the soul. 

So what do you do about it, when you need to keep that boiler from gargling your entire life down its endless oily gullet? Or, on the other end of the spectrum, what do you do when you’re not making a living at it yet, and if you stop writing today, nothing bad will happen to you, so it’s completely, horrifyingly possible that you might not start again for years, because you have a life and a job and a family and all of them insist on your energy at all times and it’s just so easy to let the dream slide away into the cracks of reality?

I think that writer’s block falls into two categories: either you hate your book or you hate yourself. Or both, which I suppose would be a third category.

The first one is easier than the second one, and it’s the one that happens to professionals most. You get to a point in a book, or you fall into the point between book one and book, two, where you aren’t inspired, you don’t know where it’s going, it just doesn’t feel right, the plot won’t plot, the protagonist won’t protag, or you’re just flat out bored. Something, somehow, doesn’t feel right, and that unright something just saps the energy from the rest of the story.

The other one is harder. Sometimes you just lose faith in yourself. And that’s okay. I lose faith in myself all the fucking time, you have no idea. Sometimes I wake up and hate everything I’ve ever written, I hate it so much I can’t believe anyone ever consented to put one word of mine on a printed page, they should have been arrested, and me, too. Thirty-six books doesn’t stop that happening. Sometimes you just lose your confidence—and writing takes so much confidence. Writing is just like life except you have to make Good (or at least Correct) Life Choices at high speed for dozens of people and also an entire universe. That doesn’t just take confidence, that takes arrogance. This is why writing fast has always worked best for me. I write like a shark—if I slow down, I remember how improbable it is to be a giant fuck-off Jurassic dino-fish blood-powered tooth-tube-cum-death machine still living at the bottom of the sea at the same time as mammals going to other planets and I stop swimming in sheer horror and drown in my native environment. And if that confidence starts to slip, it can start to slide, and if it starts to slide, it feels like you might never get it back, and be forced to stand there and watch your career and your self-esteem plummet over a waterfall like an unfortunate moose.

The fix, as far as I know a fix, as far as I know anything, is the same for the first as it is for the second. I’ve never said this at a con, I’m not even sure I understood it on a prescriptive level until I started writing this—so let’s call it our little secret. Not that this is applicable all of the time, you know the tune by now, nothing I say here applies to everyone all the time and if you think I’m full of shit, awesome, reject it all with my blessing.

But.

The fix is dramatic, insane, over-the-top, technicolor change.

Most of the time, you don’t really hate your book. You’re just bored. You’ve gotten to the part where you’re moving people around to get them into place for the next action (the dreaded middle, also known, probably, as The Winds of When Will It Come Out), you’ve digressed and strayed far from the original idea into a weird dead end having to do with somebody’s horse’s granddaughter, you’re in the middle of exposition that isn’t particularly popping.

Because look, if you were completely invested in what you were writing, consumed with it and thrilled by it, your nerves popping with how awesome it all is in your head, you’d probably be working on it, no problem. (Unless you are intimidated by how awesome it seems in your head, and how to translate that to the page, in which case we’re back to block Type 2.)

So this is how you fix that—do something completely nuts. Take a hard left or write into “but that’s ridiculous, you can’t do that with a novel” territory. Figure out what you’d rather be writing, the weird, incongruous, not-ready-for-prime-time, least predictable thing. Find something that couldn’t possibly bore you. I’m serious when I say make a meteor fall and kill half your main characters. Make the phicus in the corner of your scene of quiet domestic despair lean over and swallow the cheating husband whole. Make your noble, earnest protagonist suddenly spin around three times and turn into a dinosaur that shits French poetry. Make your destined prince marry an empty field with a single meerkat living on it. Make your sweet, pure, gentle-hearted princess murder her entire family.

It may be bugfuck stupid, it may be completely pants-on-head unworkable, but I bet you’re not staring at a blank screen anymore.

Even if you end up having to cut it in the end, it’ll make you have fun again, and the energy, the renewed interest from what you cut will remain in the final draft. When writing becomes stressful and full of pressure, it stops being fun, and the very best of stories come out when you’re just having fun. Ask me—I never took anything I wrote in the first Fairyland book seriously for a second and it’s still probably the best thing I’ve written. I was just having fun. Throwing dreams out a window and hoping they’d pile up into something soft enough to land in. 

And if you can do it? This will bandage the other problem, too. Since you’re just writing crazy shit to jumpstart your engine, and you know it doesn’t have to be there in the final manuscript, there’s no consequences for making the wrong choice. Who gives a fuck if it makes sense? Who cares if it’s not literally the most heartbreakingly genius thing ever written by human hands? You’re just playing. You’re doing the dumbest, weirdest, most inappropriate and outlandish thing you can think of. You don’t need confidence for that. You just need dumb, and that shit is easy to come by. And by the time you’re done making everyone in your nihilistic hipster high school party scene drink from a magical Four Loko can and gain immortality but, whoops, also gorilla legs and an insatiable thirst for old people’s medications, you’ll feel like you can do more or less anything and it’ll turn out pretty all right. 

The key to all this is time. Just give yourself time and space to do something other than one word in front of the other down a well-laid path. Give yourself a little electric shock-and-thrill of doing something you know you shouldn’t be doing. Know that writer’s block is the terrible thing that lurks under the bed of all writers and it has happened before and will happen again—but it really and truly can’t beat a meteor straight to the main plotline.

Or, you know.

Forgive yourself, distract yourself, trust yourself, and it’ll come right.