On writer’s block: how to write past the suck
This week I’ve wallowed in the despair of writer’s block.
It’s not that my fingers freeze on the keyboard. It’s that what comes out is crap. I know it’s crap. It knows it’s crap. And that’s what I can’t move past.
Until today. Not that I went to bed a failure and woke up Billy Wilder. No. But I picked up the crap screenplay I officially abandoned last night and decided to finish it. It’ll still be crap. But it’ll be a crap first draft.
Here’s some advice that helped me start to work through the suck. It’ll be familiar to anyone with a parent who responded to skinned knees or broken ankles with these words of love: “Jump on it.” Here’s the adult version: get the hell over yourself and keep writing.
I re-read the screenwriting instructor D.B. Gilles’s essay, “The Short Attention Span Writer.” It begins with a list of familiar excuses. No. 6 hit me in the gut:
6. You’ve finally admitted to yourself that you weren’t emotionally connected to your story and that you only started writing it because you thought it was commercial and would be easy to sell and the realization that you’ve wasted four months on the project kicks in your self-loathing mechanism
Whatever your roadblock is, he writes, the first step is to identify it and own it.
Then: jump on it.
Then there’s this video, sent to me by the world-famous journalist Peter Carbonara. It’s Ira Glass with advice for creative types who know enough to know they suck but can’t seem to get past that. You’re either a fan of Ira Glass or his voice makes you want to commit nerd genocide. But the advice is solid.
In sum: jump on it.
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Is he channeling Woody Allen? Still I object to the notion of “nerd genocide” for no particular reason. But- if ya wanna read/write crap, try a PhD dissertation on for size…
I’m as surprised as anyone that after more years of post-graduate education than anyone thought possible the one person I keep turning to to help me over those frozen-finger moments (OK, hours .. no days … OK, OK, weeks) is Stephen King and his book On Writing . Tell the truth of the story and that’s it!
I look forward to renting your movie on Netflix … or the next one, or the one after that, or….
Why are smart people so embarrassed to admit they take Stephen King’s advice? We should all be so successful, right?
In response to another comment. See in context »I think it’s becaue while King is a great storyteller and can keep you turning pages, he’s kind of a bad writer on a sentence-by-sentence level. I’m not sure how that exactly works, but it’s true. He’s not as bad as Dan Brown–although I loved The DaVinci Code, which I always refer to as the best worst-written book I’ve ever read.
And King just churns it out. He wrote one book in a day. A day! (It was Road Work, if I recall. One of the Bachman books.) Everyone knows that to be a serious novelist at least three year must pass between books. On his Wikipedia bibliography I counted over 70 published novels and short story collections since 1974, an average of 2 a year. That’s a lot of writing.
In response to another comment. See in context »Sounds like the quality vs. quantity debate: those poorly written sentences that somehow collect into self-turning pages and self-written books. The books are clearly far more than the sum of the sentences composing them.
In response to another comment. See in context »Which leads me to wonder: what if Stephen King and Dan Brown could write fewer books and edit more?
Or in the case of King, I suspect he has more ideas than he can physically capture on paper, and this is the best the process allows?