Wednesday 17 December 2014

Give writer’s block the chop!


Give writer’s block the chop!

Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? If so, be aware that there are ways to avoid it, although for many writers it’s a tough adversary. For a few it’s torture. And it came come without warning.
From what one hears writer’s block troubles a great many people who depend for their living on producing written material. Often these people have to produce material on a daily basis and occasionally the wellspring of creativity runs dry.

 The tendency when writer’s block strikes is for them to sit staring at the blank sheet, the mind devoid of ideas and in anguish. Sometimes the victim gets up to divert their attention with some other chore. Some don’t return to the writing.

All write!
 
For some decades the present writer has been blissfully devoid of this debilitating condition. All eight of the books on this website (look under Alex-books) were written in a year. This is how I have avoided ‘the dreaded block’.

The main problem seems to be fear. It’s no doubt the same sort of fear one might have felt in an exam room as a child, driven by great hope yet faced with an exam paper that gave little encouragement. The remedy seems to lie in (a) long-term preparation through researching and experiencing the subject very well to ease the act of writing, and (b) using comparatively short-term strategies that one can adopt when faced with the immediate task.

In the long term, one needs to build up a good command of the language to be used. There is little doubt that a fair or good command of vocabulary, concepts, paragraph and sentence construction, spelling and the other requirements of fluency are a great advantage when you have mastered them. They can be a brutal master where there is insufficient competence. So, work constantly to build your language and writing skills. If necessary, use a thesaurus or any help your computer can offer.
 
Further, become thoroughly familiar with your topic. This can benefit from experience gained over many years. If you’re into novels, it’s best to have ‘lived a bit’. I’ve hiked through a desert in a kilt, sailed rough seas in a small boat, assisted at a disaster, negotiated a way through warring factions, and taught an inner city school class in London where tensions were high (weak joke). You know the sort of thing.
 
In 2012 I wrote eight books.
 
“How can you write eight books in a year?” I’ve been asked. “That means one every six weeks.”
“It’s not that easy”, I recall replying.  “I spent fifty years researching the stuff.  The writing was pretty easy when I came to it”.
 
On the other hand, with modest topics one can build on experience by employing research done over a month or week, or even a couple of hours. Google is of course helpful, but often not enough. Deeper research and experience are required. That means work. Sadly, it’s something many people are not prepared to do. The result can be writer’s block.
 
In the shorter term, one can strategise means to get started. Perhaps write down random ideas imaginatively in no special order, and then start to cluster, categorise and sequence them to build up a reasonably logical sequence. Make a broad outline of your piece of writing, just using labels as you proceed.

Don’t trouble yourself too much with quality at first, or you won’t start at all! This implies not troubling with precise critical thinking in an attempt to achieve a finished product at the outset.

  • So; your first draft, or few early drafts, can be done quite roughly to ensure that you at least make a start. With a book of 200 pages, I have been accustomed to write five drafts in this manner, with simple clusters of labels for chapters.
  • These become more refined in the middle drafts, but are not yet quality- assured. Much broad revision and correction can be done, with content corrected, modified, adapted, reversed, erased, expanded, reinterpreted and so on.
  •  Perfecting and polishing the work occurs only in the final drafts. Here you focus on the nuances of language, suitable choice of words, punctuation, and elimination of overblown passages. Don’t forget searching for ‘le mot juste’, the one true word.
 Armed with the above information, give it a go! To summarise: at the start just get a framework down. Flesh it out, and then polish it.

If you find you simply don’t have the tools for writing extensive works, perhaps you should do something else. Without language built up over time, and sufficient experience of a wide range of contextual challenges, some themes will no doubt prove unsuitable. Do, preferably, tackle themes that you have experienced and understood.

On the other hand if your wish to write remains an obsession, by all means employ the ideas and strategies outlined in this article. And in that case, I wish you inner strength.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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