Writer's Block

writer's block doesn't exist it's all see writing well is hard it doesn't sound hard it sounds like the easiest thing in the world we just make up stories and write them down what could be easier than that so to cross the divide of what looks very easy from the outside but is in fact very difficult from the inside we all come up with this terminology to mystify it to make it seem more complex and mysterious in an effort to convey how difficult it really is we speak of things like muses and flow and inspiration but again it's all the reality of writing is not one of poetic divine inspiration but of professional dedication practice and endless repetition if you want to be a good musician you pick up an instrument every day and keep plucking notes until it sounds bearable you want to make swords you show up at the forge rain or shine and make crappy sword after crappy sword until one turns out good same thing with writing no muses no divine touch so then what are we talking about when we say things like writer's block if that's the fancy poetic way to describe it what do we really mean we mean we're stuck sounds a lot less poetic that way huh far more mundane like having trouble a crossword puzzle you know that's not actually a bad analogy see writing is simply problem solving we invent narrative problems for our characters and we find dramatic solutions to those problems but sometimes our problem making brain is several steps ahead of our problem solving brain so we get tripped up we get stuck writing is a creative exercise and like all acts of creation be it a painting or making a baby it's not entirely logical there's no x-ray to determine if a story is working correctly or not if you blow a transmission and i have you can look at it and go wow that's a blown transmission when you break a bone and i have you can look at a bone scan and go wow that bone sure is broken for the record those did not happen in the same incident so when we're experiencing writer's block we're subconsciously detecting something wrong with our story some unknown flaw that needs resolving but because we don't have a diagnostic test to run we waver we him and haw trying to figure out what the problem might be and we get stuck it's like being sick but not knowing with what or how your car starts to pull a little funny right before you blow a tire you know something's wrong so you slow down get out have a look around but don't actually know what the problem is writer's block isn't some muse abandoning you it's the narrative equivalent of a check engine light or a flashing caution ahead sign let's talk some examples in a project that was so long ago i don't actually remember which one it was i was having trouble with a scene and by trouble i mean i was stuck on it for several days so far so normal except that this scene was almost entirely dialogue see dialogue has always come easily to me i have a lot of fun world building plots aren't too difficult and coming up with interesting characters downright kicks my ass but dialogue that was always the easy part so i was quite flummoxed both in that i was stuck and how i was stuck i just kept shaking my head and thinking why can't i write this dialogue i can always write dialogue so i ran through some diagnostic checks there was dramatic tension in the scene it was necessary to the plot what was going on i was stuck i had writer's block and then i figured it out the either very clever or very experienced writers among you will have figured it out too based just on what i've told you about the situation so far i didn't know my characters for when i make characters i tend to start with broad one-dimensional outlines and build additional interesting layers on top of them over time it usually takes several drafts for my characters to start feeling like people instead of soggy cardboard in this scene i had the plot and the world building and all of that crap figured out but because i didn't know who my characters were i didn't know what they would say once i figured out the problem the block as it were was broken the check engine light came off i was able to spend time fleshing out the characters fix the problem and get back to work it would have been easy for me to simply write it off as writer's block as being uninspired but in my experience there is always a reason behind being uninspired the second example was more recent as in like a few days ago yeah it turns out it doesn't matter how long you write for or how good you get you're still gonna get stuck it's just the fact of life i'm working on a new novel surprise surprise and was having trouble getting started i kept opening a blank document getting more and more frustrated by it and then walking away without having gotten anything done this is unusual for me as my ideas tend to bubble and build in my mind until i have to write them down it's the only way to get them out of my head normally when i sit down to start on a new project i'm so excited i can't help myself so why was i blocked it's because this project was different it's one i already wrote a long time ago not as a novel but as a screenplay i got precisely one agent to give me feedback on it and then never did anything with it again that meant i had all the plot characters and world building figured out i just needed to write the blogging thing so what was tripping me up my voice i wrote the previous thing as a screenplay which has far greater tolerances for mechanical writing as a novel it needed a much stronger voice one i'm not accustomed to normally when writing genre fiction i eschew flowery prose i let the world be interesting and keep the language simple i don't need purple pros to make casting spells and killing monsters cool it's exciting in and of itself but this new slash old project didn't have any of that it's almost entirely limited to people talking in rooms and while i can make that dramatically interesting with plain words it's a lot harder to make tonally interesting so how did i solve it again the key thing was identifying the problem it took me a good two days to diagnose what was wrong and another day or two to fix it identifying the problem was only half the battle to actually fix it i set in my office and listen to a crap ton of tonally relevant albums at the end of my books i list what music i listen to when writing the book and there's good reason for that as we talked about in the steal like a writer video those soundtracks albums whatever helped me to steep in the mood to slip into the genre as if stepping out onto the street and my favorite jacket once i had the feel for the world i was able to find what i wanted my voice to sound like within it both of these examples while anecdotal give you all the secrets you need to getting around writer's block there is no one method for getting past a break in your story there are no five secret tips to beating writer's block any more than there are five simple things your mechanic doesn't want you to know about there can be a million and one things wrong with your car it's why the check engine light doesn't tell you exactly what it is it can't instead it's a warning light telling you to pull over the side of the road or consult a mechanic to figure out why your fancy car doesn't drive like it used to writer's block is r check engine light it's our mechanic our doctor whatever saying hey you might want to get that looked at just like with our cars or with our health you have to pull over to the side of the road pop the hood and give it a good once-over is the scene we're writing interesting not just to the story but to itself in the same way that we make sure there's gas in the tank are the characters we've hinged the story on dynamic enough to carry us through the plot in the same way that we need to make sure there's air in the tires is the engine clunking or the transmission slipping in the same way that our plots can get tripped up or disjointed or is everything running smoothly can we get back on the narrative highway there's one last thing to talk about before we wrap up and that's burnout now burnout is a topic that deserves its own video i just want to touch on it briefly here as the problems can often be confused or intertwined burnout is not writer's block but can often feel like it leading you to be disenfranchised with your work or not know what to do next when i'm having creative burnout i typically solve it by binging a metric crap ton of media usually movies but anything will do pick your poison of choice be it video games comic books or anime it'll get the creative juices going i'll let you make your own anime joke there if you can't tell the difference between writer's block and burnout take a month off watch a bunch of movies and see if it goes away if it does it was burnout if it doesn't your story has some flaw you don't want to face pop open the hood get out the engine grease and see what's going on with it so to summarize writer's block is a excuse we tell ourselves in reality we're just stuck and don't want to face the problems in our own story in order to fix those problems we need to fall back on the fundamentals break everything down to its constituent parts and give it a thorough examination only once we have identified and diagnosed the actual problem can we set about fixing it writer's block is nothing to be feared it's a part of the business and being a professional means coming up with ways to deal with it i'm michael aguero thanks for watching if you want to check out a story i didn't get stuck on you can pick up my latest book thrice dead witch it's a story about a remote village deep in a southern forest tales of children gone missing and deformed infants have the local population and the ruling crown casting accusations of curses at one another an expedition is sent in to find the truth and bring the monster responsible to justice if you want to support the channel you can pick it up on amazon kindle or google play every little bit helps thank you for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Michael Aguero

Views: 185

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Id: Cmzh2b48taM

Length: 11min 40sec (700 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 23 2021