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Press Unstick me for a surprise drill, or name the block above. You may also simply write. That, inconveniently, also works.
by Stewart Ferris
Write Anyway
Writer's block is not a diagnosis. It is a stalled habit. Here are free writing exercises, creative writing prompts, and a quiet desk that get a page moving again — from a writer of fifty books who does not wait to feel inspired.
First, name it
What is actually blocking you?
Blocks are not all the same stall. Pick the one that sounds like this afternoon. You will get an exercise fitted to it, and a desk to do it on.
The desk
Sit down and make a mess
Exercises on the left, paper on the right. A sprint clock if you need a grown-up in the room. Nothing leaves this browser unless you copy or download it.
0 words on the page·0 today
10:00
The well
Steal a beginning
First lines, people, objects, and constraints. None of them are your book. All of them will get a sentence onto the page, which is the entire game.
Draw a prompt when you are tired of inventing the first move.
Advice
Notes from the trade
The block is usually a story you are telling about the work. These are the counter-stories that keep professionals at the desk.
Professionals write on Tuesdays. The myth of the waiting muse is a very elegant way to protect a blank page. If you can only work when you feel inspired, you have a hobby with expensive stationery. Start before you are ready. The heat arrives, if it arrives, after the second paragraph.
Plots travel. Premises get recycled. What a reader will follow from book to book is the particular way you notice the world — the jokes you cannot help, the details you over-value, the sentences that could only have come from your head. Technique is there to carry the voice, not to replace it.
A note that hurts is usually a note that found something. The amateur defends the sentence; the professional asks whether the reader stumbled, and why. You do not have to take every suggestion. You do have to get curious about every flinch.
Books are not written on bank holidays in a farmhouse, except in the blurbs of people who also wrote on wet Wednesdays. A modest, repeating appointment with the page will outrun talent that only visits in the mood. Put the session where a meeting would go.
Knowing the next turn — even roughly — means you are never staring at infinity. Character want, obstacle, consequence: it is not a formula so much as a set of rails. You can always leave the rails. It is harder to lay them while the train is supposed to be moving.
You cannot edit a void. You can edit a mess. Lower the status of the current page until it is merely clay, then make more clay. The inner critic may sit in the waiting room with a magazine. It will get its turn — later.
Abandoned work cannot be improved, sold, or learned from. A finished imperfect piece teaches you more than a perfect fragment you have been 'about to return to' since last spring. Reach the last page.
The block sometimes is not on the page. It is at the envelope. Read the guidelines. Put the right thing in the right pile. Keep a list. Expect silence and the odd bruising no. Persistence is filing, follow-up, and the refusal to treat one rejection as a verdict on your character.