Just some food for thought, on why some people might experience writer's block:
When I began writing my first novel, the words just flowed and flowed, without ever a break or pause in the process. As I wrote, I would often wonder why other people suffered from writer's block so much. The reason it was so easy was that, at the time, I had no idea where I wanted the story to go, no idea what was good or bad prose, and no preconceived notions on what was acceptible, good, bad, or outright barbarious.
I just wrote,... and let the story flow, often pausing to imagine upcoming scenes that I wanted, until finally the story was finished. Of course, I did this four times, and rewrote the same story over and over, as my skill increased, and as the plot was updated with new ideas.
Finally, I decided to rewrite the book from scratch, because it was publishing time. Until then, I was just writing for fun, when I was bored. This time, I thought the whole thing through, added a TON to the story, and developed this new thing called "expectations" of things that I wanted to happen in the story. The problem was that, in order to make these ideas work and happen the way I wanted, they would have to be "set up" with long, boring parts that were suddenly extremely difficult to write.
Since I had planned everything out, and wanted all these things to happen in the story, I needed fill in the holes of what was happening BETWEEN the interesting stuff. You can't ONLY have interesting scenes; something has to lead up to each thing... so, how do you fill in the holes without boring the reader to tears?
That's when writer's block first appeared, and I believe quite a few people might suffer from the same type of challenge. The challenge is: How do you take a completely boring scene, and make it interesting? How do you fill in the holes that separate each of the parts that you want to happen? Even more challenging; How do you fill in the holes, and make the filling interesting?
- Look at amateur film-makers... like High School kids, and college students. I know that a lot of them like to base entire movies around just one or two cool scene that they want to happen. They get an idea, then blend the entire story around it, making sure not to harm or lose the idea in any way.
And so, like those amateur movie-makers, a lot of writers have all these cool ideas that MUST happen in the story, and they find themselves getting stuck with dangerously boring scenes that wrap around those cool parts, or no ideas at all, because those expectations accidently took over the story. Technically, when a writer says, "I have no ideas," that doesn't mean they aren't able to think suddenly; it means they have no GOOD ideas, or USEFUL ideas. What this means is that everything is boring.
This is the part where everyone speculates on how to find a solution to this.
I'll start with my 2 cents, which I think is what got me through those parts:
1) Good, interesting characters who can make an interesting situation out of anything. If the characters aren't dangerously interesting, they aren't gonna do anyway to help carry the reader through the stretches of no plot.
Another idea I've for getting through this is:
2) Good, interesting characters. Again, if they can get the reader into the most ghastly of boring situations, you're all set. If I made characters of my next-door neighbors, I couldn't do that... but, if those same boring neighbors turned out to be two political opposites, both striving for world-domination, and discovered each other at that moment, you could have some instant-filler for all of your otherwise most boring situations throughout the rest of the book.
Take a scene like this, for example: you want your characters to meet at the DMV to get their car registration, and you want them to stand in line for half and hour while an unseen heist goes on the background. At the end of a long scene, in which you don't want to cover what's going on in the background for some thought-out reason, the bad-guys show themselves, and the plot continues. So, what are these characters going to talk about while they stand in line for half an hour?
Well, if you've got characters worthy of today's bored readers, you've got yourself a fun or interesting scene out of just standing in line at the DMV.
So, I think characters have a lot to do with writer's block, assuming that my definition of writer's block affects a significant percentage of people. I know that there are probably different kinds of writer's block, but this is what I'm used to. It lasted a LONG time (took a year to write the book), but the characters got me through it with their chemistry toward each other.
The only last thing I would say caused it for me was trying too hard to get each paragraph perfect. I'm the kind of writer who isn't happy with something until I've gone over it two or three times, so I could spend 10 minutes on a single set of sentences, trying to mix and shuffle them until something sounded right.
-- So, those are my ideas that might help you in your approach to getting rid of it... but I know there are more reasons, so feel free to post your suggestions. I know characters are super-important, but there's more to a story than just that, for example...
Holy cow. How did this get so long? I only intended to write a few paragraphs.
When I began writing my first novel, the words just flowed and flowed, without ever a break or pause in the process. As I wrote, I would often wonder why other people suffered from writer's block so much. The reason it was so easy was that, at the time, I had no idea where I wanted the story to go, no idea what was good or bad prose, and no preconceived notions on what was acceptible, good, bad, or outright barbarious.
I just wrote,... and let the story flow, often pausing to imagine upcoming scenes that I wanted, until finally the story was finished. Of course, I did this four times, and rewrote the same story over and over, as my skill increased, and as the plot was updated with new ideas.
Finally, I decided to rewrite the book from scratch, because it was publishing time. Until then, I was just writing for fun, when I was bored. This time, I thought the whole thing through, added a TON to the story, and developed this new thing called "expectations" of things that I wanted to happen in the story. The problem was that, in order to make these ideas work and happen the way I wanted, they would have to be "set up" with long, boring parts that were suddenly extremely difficult to write.
Since I had planned everything out, and wanted all these things to happen in the story, I needed fill in the holes of what was happening BETWEEN the interesting stuff. You can't ONLY have interesting scenes; something has to lead up to each thing... so, how do you fill in the holes without boring the reader to tears?
That's when writer's block first appeared, and I believe quite a few people might suffer from the same type of challenge. The challenge is: How do you take a completely boring scene, and make it interesting? How do you fill in the holes that separate each of the parts that you want to happen? Even more challenging; How do you fill in the holes, and make the filling interesting?
- Look at amateur film-makers... like High School kids, and college students. I know that a lot of them like to base entire movies around just one or two cool scene that they want to happen. They get an idea, then blend the entire story around it, making sure not to harm or lose the idea in any way.
And so, like those amateur movie-makers, a lot of writers have all these cool ideas that MUST happen in the story, and they find themselves getting stuck with dangerously boring scenes that wrap around those cool parts, or no ideas at all, because those expectations accidently took over the story. Technically, when a writer says, "I have no ideas," that doesn't mean they aren't able to think suddenly; it means they have no GOOD ideas, or USEFUL ideas. What this means is that everything is boring.
This is the part where everyone speculates on how to find a solution to this.
I'll start with my 2 cents, which I think is what got me through those parts:
1) Good, interesting characters who can make an interesting situation out of anything. If the characters aren't dangerously interesting, they aren't gonna do anyway to help carry the reader through the stretches of no plot.
Another idea I've for getting through this is:
2) Good, interesting characters. Again, if they can get the reader into the most ghastly of boring situations, you're all set. If I made characters of my next-door neighbors, I couldn't do that... but, if those same boring neighbors turned out to be two political opposites, both striving for world-domination, and discovered each other at that moment, you could have some instant-filler for all of your otherwise most boring situations throughout the rest of the book.
Take a scene like this, for example: you want your characters to meet at the DMV to get their car registration, and you want them to stand in line for half and hour while an unseen heist goes on the background. At the end of a long scene, in which you don't want to cover what's going on in the background for some thought-out reason, the bad-guys show themselves, and the plot continues. So, what are these characters going to talk about while they stand in line for half an hour?
Well, if you've got characters worthy of today's bored readers, you've got yourself a fun or interesting scene out of just standing in line at the DMV.
So, I think characters have a lot to do with writer's block, assuming that my definition of writer's block affects a significant percentage of people. I know that there are probably different kinds of writer's block, but this is what I'm used to. It lasted a LONG time (took a year to write the book), but the characters got me through it with their chemistry toward each other.
The only last thing I would say caused it for me was trying too hard to get each paragraph perfect. I'm the kind of writer who isn't happy with something until I've gone over it two or three times, so I could spend 10 minutes on a single set of sentences, trying to mix and shuffle them until something sounded right.
-- So, those are my ideas that might help you in your approach to getting rid of it... but I know there are more reasons, so feel free to post your suggestions. I know characters are super-important, but there's more to a story than just that, for example...
Holy cow. How did this get so long? I only intended to write a few paragraphs.
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