| Why can't writer's block be like a dessert, instead of a desert? |
When the country goes into recession, you don’t put stock in
gold or guns—you buy trees, so you don’t have to worry about running out of
paper.
When your sister steps on a pencil, you feel like crying—IT
STILL HAD AN ERASER!
When the rest of your family is huddled under blankets in
pillows in the middle of an electric storm, you’re cursing the lack of
computers and lighting candles so you can keep writing.
You are a WRITER. But... you’re a writer with a secret.
The search history on your laptop is full of articles with
titles like, “How to Defeat Writer’s Block” and “How to Unleash Your Muse.”
Because the truth is, you’ve never written more than three chapters of a novel
in your life. You just can’t seem to get past the first few pages before you realize
you’re stumped—the words just won’t come out! For you, writer’s block is a
permanent condition. You are, in short, in WRITER’S HELL. And the worst part
is, you don’t know why you’re still there.
Now you can find out.
I wandered in that desert of stagnation for nearly six years myself, unable to
produce more than a few kid’s stories—and then suddenly, in the space of four
months, finished a 70,000 word novel and started on a second. To help you get
out of your personal desert, I’d like to introduce “Kill Your Blank Pages: A Ten Part Series on Writer's Block.”
Each part in the series should help you to identify what’s clogging up your creative process
and show you exactly how eliminate it. Young writers, feel free to do a happy dance--this series will be geared especially towards you!
The
first five parts will look at story-building—oftentimes, you get stuck
quite simply because your story isn’t ready to be written, and your muse knows
it. The last five parts will look at
freeing your creativity through lifestyle and mental adjustments.
Hopefully, by the end of the series, you will always know
how to clear away writer’s block because you will always know exactly how you
got there in the first place. To solve a problem, you have to know it’s there,
and you have to know how to solve it.
Let’s kill some blank pages.
