I use that headline strategically so all the blocked writers out there will find my page when they are Googling “writer’s block.” If you are a writer who has never Googled “writer’s block,” then you are also a liar, like the Don Juans who say they have never looked up sex tips online, or the promiscuous women who say they have never Googled “itchy vagina.”
I am not 100% confident that I am actually over my writer’s block, but here is how I’ve been psyching myself up to work on the novel again.
1. I finally came to grips with the fact that books do not get written in my sleep. I actually have dreams now where I am revising Chapter Two, and I am doing an awesome job. This is like when Darren dreams that he has designed a new CSS layout for WordPress, and he wakes up all excited. Don’t count on doing your best work while you’re sleeping. Now you are freed up to focus on the daytime, which brings me to number two.
2. Write in the morning instead of “after lunch,” “after this nap,” “after these four glasses of wine,” or “after I finish this inspirational book about writing.” Even if you don’t consider yourself a morning person, I think it’s great for morale to write first thing after breakfast. You feel like you accomplished your day’s literary work, and then the pressure is off so you are more likely to keep writing later in the day, guilt-free. Your boss will understand that you have to show up a few hours late to the office.
3. Don’t kill your morning blogging about writer’s block when you should be concentrating on conquering it.
4. Opening and closing the refrigerator does not a novel write.
5. Remember that you are not lazy; you are a tortured artist. Unless the converse works better for your productivity, in which case stop being so pretentious and get to work. I personally go back and forth. I either can’t write because I’m so complicated and angstful, and that makes me watch nature documentaries about amphibious monkeys in the middle of the afternoon, or I can’t write because I’m such an undisciplined, lousy, untalented person, and those swimming monkeys are irresistible to my lower animal brain. Maybe there should be something in between these extremes, like “I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s write a book.”
6. Remember that other people consider you a writer if you’re sitting at your computer typing out words. That’s all it takes. Don’t you want other people to think you’re a writer? Don’t you care what other people think of you?
7. Write in public. Find an anonymous coffee shop and write there. It is important to get out of your house and turn your laptop monitor towards other people so you will be shamed out of looking at the usual websites and you will focus instead on your Word document. Being away from the neighborhood of your kitchen, couch, and bed – the devil’s playground – is worth the $2 you will have to pay for a beverage. You will also feel like you are part of a community. Just don’t be one of those annoying coffee shop writers who is always looking around the room for inspiration so other customers can’t help but fear they’re being written into someone’s bad poetry.
8. When I’m especially blocked, I like to think about all the olden-timey writers who had to work by candlelight and who didn’t have indoor plumbing and who ran the risk of their only manuscript getting burned in a house fire and who didn’t have the incentive of a million dollar, three-book deal from Random House to keep them going. They also lacked our luxurious life spans, so we have no excuse to be less prolific than them. No excuse. Did Chaucer take breaks to pluck his eyebrows? No, and neither will you.
9. You are going to die one day and leave nothing but bones, unless you keep writing and then you will leave bones and a jump drive.