Do You Have Any Recommendations On What To Do When You Cant Write?

Do you have any recommendations on what to do when you can’t write?

I’ve been struggling to write for years, but telling stories is all I want to do. I have ideas and plots and characters all figured out! But actually getting the words onto paper? I just can’t do it. There’s a mental block or something getting in the way.

I want to write, I so badly do. I want to tell my stories! But no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I love the story, the words never work properly. I can day dream scenes up perfectly, but as soon as I’m near paper the words all vanish.

I guess what I’m actually asking is: how did you defeat the blank page?

Well, first of all, I can confidently tell you that your storytelling per se is working just fine. You just told me a perfectly cogent story right there, in writing. So that's good to know.

Now let me put your mind a little at rest by telling you something reassuring about the Writer's Brain:

It's not the sharpest knife in the block, if you take my meaning. It can be tricked. It can be fooled. It can be bamboozled into working when it doesn't want to... sometimes with embarrassing ease. (And this approach is, by and large, far preferable to sitting around over-analyzing one's interior life to figure out what went wrong with your developmental process somewhere in the dim lost past. Just hornswoggle the silly thing into working and then do the analysis later, if you can be bothered.)

Sometimes just changing something basic in the process the Writer's Brain is expecting is enough to make it lose the plot (so to speak...) and let you get on with work. And in your case I'd say, more or less immediately: Have you tried telling the story to yourself out loud, recording it, and then transcribing the recording?

Because this problem is a commonplace among storytellers. Sit them down in the pub and give them tea or a drink and start them going, and you'll get half an effortless hour of hilarious prose about What The Cat Did In The Middle Of The Night or When The Neighbors Were Fighting In The Street Again Yesterday. But show them blank paper, or an empty screen, and (now that the pressure to perform is suddenly in place) they freeze.

So try doing an end run around your writing brain. Borrow or otherwise procure a little recorder of some kind. (Or if you've got a smartphone, add a voice recording app to it.) Go get comfortable somewhere and get yourself into that daydream state, and then—making sure the recorder's on—start talking.

It doesn't have to be perfect unblemished prose. The pursuit of that comes later, after draft zero-minus-one. Just tell the story... or some of it. Or a fragment of it. Even a few paragraphs is a triumph, in a situation like this. You may, during the recording, have to talk yourself into the story stage by starting out talking about something else first. Let that happen.

Then when you're done recording, listen to it and transcribe it (typed or handwritten, as you please).

And maybe a day later, do this again. And a day or two later, once more. And so forth.

You're going to have to keep at this, because your Writer's Brain may start suspecting what you're up to, and try throwing spanners into the works. (Its favorite being "Oh, this isn't working, I may as well give up..." Pay no attention to that nagging little voice behind the curtain. Just keep doing what you're doing. Persistence is a superpower.)

The thing to keep reminding yourself, as you settle into this process, is that sooner or later the WB's resistance is going to flag, because you really do want to tell stories. It does too. What you have to teach it is that—to coin a phrase—resistance is useless. :)

Anyway: give this a try. You'll need to be doing this daily for at least a couple of months to find out whether it works or not. So let me know how it goes.

(BTW: once you've broken through the barrier, you may well find that dictation is a good routine way for you to generate your first draft. At that point—should you feel inclined to go a little higher-tech than recording and hand transcription—let me recommend Dragon Anywhere. This is a month-to-month subscription version of Dragon's flagship text to speech program—the one @petermorwood and I got Terry Pratchett to use when he started having difficulty typing. I use Anywhere a lot, on days when it's easier to write stretched out or lying down than it is sitting up. It transcribes what you say, and then you can just email it to yourself and cut-and-paste it into your writing document. Very handy.)

Hope this helps!

Here, the cold is such I don't feel anything, and the sun is a blood clot in a desert of crude and naked white.

Writing tip #1

As a reader, one of my biggest pet peeves is seeing a character introduced as "clever", their intelligence treated as some sort of super power that helped them out of impossible situations off-screen or even worse, they solved basic elementary problems that I remember getting as homework in middle school and everybody is in awe of such a wondrous mind. As a reader, few things irk me more than that kind of characterization.

But as writer, I get it! I understand the appeal of writing smart character, they can be so cool and challenge our traditional perception of strength and pose interesting questions etc... and as I'm not that bright myself either, I end up with the sensation of struggling to write a character much smarter than myself.

But that's okay! Luckily for me, I study developmental and cognitive psychology, which gives me tools to help me write smart characters without having the same skillset, so I thought I would share!

#1: research cognitive psychology, because there is so much more to say than what I know and can fit in a tumblr post, so go look it up- I promise it's worth it.

#2: your IQ number is practically a myth. Unless it helps diagnose and measure a global intellectual deficiency, that number alone is generally worthless as it's nothing but the average between scores of wildly different abilities which belong to the traditional model of intelligence (around which there is no consensus today, so keep in mind that it's incomplete at best.) From that it follows that it's a terrible way to describe a character, as it doesn't refer to any specific skill -and while there is partial correlation between these scores, I can guarantee you nobody is exactly as good in calculus as they are in English as they are in geometry etc. Describe what the character is smart in, what "kind" or smart they are if you wish; the separation between book smart, street smart and people smart is a good start, but still not enough: there are many flavours of booksmart alone, nevermind the others. Again, look it up: an easy background to use is the Wikipedia page for "Theory of Multiple Intelligences". I promise it will help!

#3. Sometimes less is more. Your character doesn't have to be the best student in the country or win every prize. Did you know that Einstein was considered a bad student? Or that the incredible mathematician Euler got second place in the 1727 Paris Academy Science Competition? It's fine for your character to be second place, it's fine not to win every time, even in their own domain of expertise. If you tell me someone got the bronze medal at the Olympics, I'm still gonna assume them a better athlete than the vaste majority of people, and few would disagree with that idea; it's the same with intelligence. Your character should be allowed to fail, and simply to not always be the best -if not because it makes them more humane, because we love to project on smart characters, it strokes our ego. Think of all the stressed out straight A students on the verge of burn-out projecting on your characters: let them know it's okay! A- is still very good! You're doing great!

Anyway I'll probably make more posts about this because there's so much to say but it's probably too long already so I'll stop here. You know how it works, this is just my opinion, I'm not the authority on writing, but I thought it could be helpful so if it doesn't work for you, don't follow this advice! Let me know what you think, and please be kind

It's the sound of my brother, twisting the key in the lock like a knife in a wound

And me gritting my teeth, on a muzzle, on my tongue.

It's everything we need, all that we must, we should

What needed done was done, but he did it all wrong.

How dare he say he is sorry

But

What could he ever say to me?

She rested her head down on the desk, in that spot of light where the afternoon sun laid its warmth. Her eye, bright gemstone under a half-shut lid, caught the shine of a ray astray and gleamed with it, a drop of honey swirling in molasse, the discreet shining of a golden light peering through a deep and muted opaqueness -a quiet, imposing, profound eye that drew you in to its unknown in a serene kind of turmoil. It reminded him in its aspect of a cup of black tea under the yellow lamp, clouded and dark as if the colour itself was the guardian of the taste, and how people would attempt, having drank up to the last drop, to decipher secrets in the remains of the leaves. It was the most elegant shade of brown.