I think we’ve all been there: the dreaded writer’s block. “Help,” you might think, “why am I doing this again?”
It’s important to know you’re not alone if you’re wondering how to get through writer’s block. It’s a really common thing that the authors I work with experience, and I’m going to talk about an aspect of how to get over writer’s block in this blog post, so read on.
If you’ve been struck by the paralysis that can happen when you sit to write, or think about writing, you’ll know what I mean.
Suddenly they’re there.
All of the people who have ever made fun of you, criticised you, made you feel small. Add in all of the people who you think do it better than you, have achieved more than you, and who are judging you, and you’ve got a pretty potent mix that is guaranteed to stop you writing.
Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some instructions on writing and life, has what I think is my absolute favourite way of describing how this feels. She says:
“Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.”
It’s that feeling on the back of your neck of being watched, caught, collared that will stunt your writing. A destructive audience mindset will do just that.
We sabotage ourselves by insisting on writing whilst we’re in the audience saboteur space.
When we try to create whilst keeping an eye on the judgemental audience we’ve convinced ourselves is out to get us, we dilute our work and our words, cramming it into boxes that are not of our making, or that we have made to fit what others seem to want for us.
We let down not only ourselves, because we’re not putting into the world that which needs to be born through us, but we’re letting down our most powerful ally next to our Inner Writer: the reader who needs us most.
Revise your reader
If you’re creating, and you are thinking of your audience and you become aware that you’re diluting your work – making it hard for yourself, what do you do?
Firstly I’d stop.
It can be really tempting to just push on and try to fix the problem on the fly. To keep writing, pushing it out of yourself, forcing it.
This is not going to save you time, I promise!
Though you might be getting more words on that page, they will still be stilted, diluted and might just feel a bit ‘off’.
Stopping and getting yourself back to your creative centre, connecting to your Inner Writer, and calling up your image of your reader will be much quicker, and more effective, than trying to push through.
If you need to, revise who your reader is and reacquaint yourself with your one person who really, really needs your work. I created a PDF workbook for my Book.Write.Now Course participants, and you can access that to help you get clear on your reader here.
Basically, your Reader definition is there to bring you back on course if you feel ‘off’. A lot of the time we can feel a little ‘off’ in our writing, without knowing why.
By now you’ll have a checklist of points to pay attention to, to see if you’re off course in any of them: are you connected to your purpose, do you have a relationship of trust with your Inner Writer? Have you made your commitment to the book?
When I feel a bit off, or the authors I work with feel off, the other reason is usually because I’ve begun to write with a slightly paranoid eye on my audience, expecting to be judged and criticised by all those who have traditionally judged and criticised me.
I forget that I’m not actually writing for them. I forget that I’m writing because there’s an inner nudge, an insistence and an inspiration that I can’t ignore. I forget that that inspiration is far larger than the critical and judgemental world that I’ve allowed myself to imagine.
How do we get around that?
Give with your writing
This is where one of my most favourite ideas in writing comes in, and that is the idea of giving with your writing.
When you have your Reader in mind while you’re writing, you can make sure that you’re writing to the centre of their needs.
Knowing their needs – and what you have to offer them – means that you can speak directly to what they need to hear from you, which makes it much easier to get what you have inside yourself out onto the page.
It can be quite hard to decide what to write, if you’ve got a lot of ideas about almost everything, like a lot of us do.
Keeping your Reader front and centre at these times makes it much easier to hone your ideas and shape them into something that’s useful to someone.
This is even true for fiction, short stories and poetry. If you’ve been inspired to write them, then there’s someone out there who needs to hear them.
Again: who are we to question the Management? Connecting to the Management, and finding your Reader for that project will focus you on exactly what needs to come out onto that page.
Giving with your writing involves writing with a sense of generosity in place.
Here I mean generosity at both ends of the writing spectrum: being humbled by the generosity of the Management in giving you inspiration in the form of experiences, life, to write about and from. Combined with a large feeling of generosity to your Reader, the person to whom you’re writing.
If you come from a place that is bracketed in this way by generosity, you can write cushioned in its support, knowing that not only have you been asked to write what you’re writing, you are also writing what someone needs to hear.
Give with your writing, find someone you so desperately want to give to that you just do it – write to them, for them, your best, most heartfelt work you can – just so that you can give it as a present to them. That’s the feeling that we’re going for; when we write to our Reader, as we’ve defined them.
Cultivating this posture of generosity is why we focussed on defining our reader back in an earlier module, and also why we keep coming back to the reader over and over.
Revisit your reader often
You’ll find that a large percentage of the issues in your book or your writing process can be overcome by coming back to your reader, over and over.
The interesting thing about writing with generosity is that it then generates MORE.
More writing, more ideas.
It uncorks the flow, so that abundance is the norm.
The paradox of writing is that the more you do it, the more there will be. It’s not something that runs out, but rather something that fills a void you make by doing it. Use up your words, there will be more.
There’s also a quote by George Balanchine, contemporary dance visionary of the 20th Century that fits particularly well with what we’re talking about here too. He is well known for saying:
“Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for—for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.”
Totally giving what you have, right here, today, now, frees you from worry about what you’ve said, and what you will say. It’s a focus on writing in the present moment that takes the work out of the process.
Editing comes later.
We’re talking here about how to get that book on the page in the first instance.
Use the information to normalise and direct your writing experience: give to your reader generously with your writing, and you’ll be far less prone to writer’s block.
xx Tamara
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