Tagged: writer’s block

Writer’s Block? Our Ounce of Prevention = Stubs

r-avatarWe haven’t talked about the special sauce in our team-writing process lately. We still rely on stubs, and so should you. Besides curing warts and controlling the weather, stubs have another miraculous ability we’ve neglected to mention. If you use them, you’ll rid yourself of writer’s block forever! Okay, sometimes it might still be hard to get rolling, but we find our stubs help us keep on track and on task, and make the tyranny of the blank page almost a thing of the past.

Here’s how it works.

The stubs themselves are “burner” writing. You know you’re the only one who will ever see them, so you can give yourself permission for the prose to suck. That’s terrifically liberating, and paradoxically can lead to your best work. If the stub starts to get “too good,” that’s fine. You’ll be able to mine it for gold later on.

When it’s time to do the “real” writing, the stubs give you something to use as a jumping-off point. There might be gold in there, after all. Even if there’s not, the stub holds all the minutiae for you, so you don’t have to worry about it. This lets you apply your energies to crafting magical sentences and inhabiting the characters.

The next time you feel blocked, think of stubs as a way to get get unstuck. Optimally, they’re part of a system that begins with a thorough outline, but you can get a lot of bang out of them even without additional infrastructure. Maybe all you need from them is their disposability, so you can get out of your own way and start writing. Or maybe your stub will just be a list of the key details you need to keep track of in the scene. The important thing isn’t to use them right, it’s to use them to write.

Slower Traffic Keep Right

r-avatarEverybody gets blocked once in a while. Maybe it’s due to burnout, maybe a plot tangle has you stumped, or maybe it’s just one of those days when the muse has fallen silent. It never feels good, whatever the cause.

It’d be great to be able to say there’s a sure-fire way to get past a blockage, but different things work for different people. Maybe working on another project for a while, or maybe just taking a stroll for some fresh air. You’ll need to try stuff and see what works.

Lately, Kent has been struggling to find his game face. The words are there, but they won’t do as he commands. (No one who’s met him believes a word of this, yet it’s true.) Meanwhile, Jen is on a roll. By working together, we greatly reduce the chances of the project getting stalled out completely. Oh, that happens. It happens a fair bit, actually. But either of us on our own would get stuck much more often.

With a partner who’s in a good place productivity-wise, you can be less stressed out over an occasional off day. It can also mean that while you’re stewing in frustration over your inability to write anything, you’ll have a partner in the room with you making it all look so easy. But don’t take it personally. Be glad someone’s got your back, and give yourself the time you need to get limbered up again.

Creative Drought

r-avatarWe’ve reached the point in the lifecycle of every Rune Skelley project where we have to put the manuscript aside and do other things. Through our years writing together we’ve identified this as our main weak spot, and we’ve developed a system for dealing with it without losing all forward momentum.

I imagine that every writer encounters problems of the same ilk, where you’ve written all you can and there is no more creative spark. A coauthor can often help cover for minor bouts of writer’s block, as we talked about before. But sometimes you both deplete your compositional resources at the same time. When we first started writing, this led to us walking away from the project for months at a time while our batteries recharged. These days we have several novels that are in various stages of being finished, and we try to shuffle between them as needed. If we can’t write anything new on Project 4, well Project 3 needs to reread and edited.

This time is a little different though. We hadn’t quite hit the wall when we decided to put the novel aside. The excuses were creeping in, and the output on any particular evening was waning, but we were both still chugging along, noses to the grindstone. Life intervened, tossing us a huge project that requires a lot of time and focus. Apart from attending our weekly critique group and updating this blog, we haven’t done anything writing related for nearly a month. It’s a very unusual position to find ourselves in.

The outside project is starting to wind down. We’re not ready to set quill to paper again just yet, but hope to get back to it in another week or two. And we hope that having a partner will ease the transition back to the writing life.

An Equal And Opposite Reaction

r-avatarEvery writer has to deal with occasional bouts of writer’s block, or lack of motivation, or distractibility.

Squirrel!

This week has been just such a week for Jen. She wants to keep the project moving, but can’t seem to find her way into any of the scenes that are already in stub form. Usually that would mean that it’s time to write more stubs, but we are currently well-stocked. More of the scenes need to be fully written so that we can make sure we’re still heading where the outline says we are.

Luckily for Jen, she has a writing partner. Kent is not suffering from the same malaise as Jen, and has been writing some great stuff, if he does say so himself. Jen happens to agree. But that’s part of the problem, actually. Lately Jen feels like Kent has been using all the good sentences and she’s just randomly smashing the keyboard.

This compare and contrast mindset can be one of the downsides to collaboration. When the stars align, the co-authors drive each other to brilliance. Other times, someone feels like they’ve been left in the dust. Right now it’s Jen’s turn, but Kent had a similar episode as we were finishing up the rewrites on the previous project.

The two of us trust each other enough to talk about these feelings and reassure one another that everything’s golden. As you embark on a collaboration with a new partner it’s something you should keep an eye out for. Collaboration is not competition. You and your co-writer should cover for each other when necessary, and celebrate when everything goes smoothly.