o, if you’ve been reading my earlier posts, you’ll know that the current theme for my advice is writer’s block.
The two previous posts were about techniques that are for dealing with writer’s block once it’s happened. In an ideal world, however, that doesn’t need to happen.
I have a number of methods to help ensure this, which I tend to use in conjunction with one another. Everyone has a different style, so not all of these may work for you, but even if they don’t, hopefully reading about my process will help you to start thinking about your own, and analysing it so you can figure out your own preventative techniques! 🙂
1. Chapter Planning
It’s not always easy to just sit down and plot out the entirety of your story, and not everyone finds planning the best way to work, but if you can try to nail down key plot points and moments for your main characters, it will be a massive amount of help to you later down the track when you come to write things up.
Of course, having a skeleton to work off of is better than having nothing at all, but once you’ve got the bare bones down, you need to start fleshing out your plans for other characters – minor ones as well as major ones – and general events that will contribute to your story. This will help prevent you from getting stuck when you’ve got only two pages of a chapter written, but no more ideas to fill it in with.
The great thing about chapter planning is that it’s something you can continually do – it’s an ongoing process. You don’t need to know everything about your plot before you can start writing. So long as you’ve got your beginning hammered out quite well, you can keep on coming back to later parts of your story, and adding more to them, tweaking things as you go. As you write, you’ll generate more ideas to later feed back into your story, so it’s sort of a self-enriching cycle.
2. Know What You Want from Your Chapters
This can only be achieved if you have planned your story out sufficiently. For each chapter, you need to know what your desired end point is – what it is that you want your characters to achieve, and where you want them to be (emotionally, as well as physically) by the end of the chapter. Once you have the starting point of where you want the chapter to begin, and the ending point of where you want it to close, filling in the middle will become a lot easier.
By knowing your target, you’re less likely to wander aimlessly about until you get stuck and end up with writer’s block. Granted, you may experience troubles, but by keeping where you want to end up with the chapter in your mind, you’ll be able to work out a way to get your characters there.
3. Stopping at the Right Place
This is something that I have discovered to be really important, and which I had to learn the hard way. It ties in with with chapter planning, and essentially revolves around the tricky method of stopping writing before you write yourself to a standstill, BUT not stopping writing when you’re on a really good streak. Hard, I know. But this one is all about judgement calls, and knowing yourself.
If you know where you’re going, and if you’re in a really good place while writing – don’t stop there, especially if you’ve got a lot of fine details and dialogue flying around in your head for the scenes you’re writing. Get that stuff down! A perennial issue of writers is that we all think we’ll remember the details – the descriptions, the dialogue, the action – of an idea that’s just struck us, and that it’ll keep, but it won’t. Write it down before you forget it, or you’ll be kicking yourself later.
The tricky part of this technique is being aware of when you’re starting to run out of steam – in a writing sense, and an ideas sense. When you’re right in the middle of it, your mind will probably be brimming with ideas, so that when you encounter potential problems or plot holes, your mind is pretty quick to fill them up. As you start to lose momentum and slow down however, (I tend to find this happens most often towards the end of a chapter), ideas become sluggish. But because you want to make the most of your high, you keep writing and writing until you write yourself into a corner. Then you congratulate yourself for a good day’s work, and leave your desk.
Writer’s block occurs when you return. You’re stuck in a corner that requires momentum to get out of, but because you’re heading in cold, the difficulty is intensified, and often it’s easier to give up than try to muddle through the problem, because you can’t see where you want to be (the exact reason that made you stop there in the first place).
To prevent this, stop when you’re just coming down from your high. You’ve finished a really good bit, and you can see your way forwards a little bit, but you’re still not quite sure where that next end point is. You’re not hot, you’re not cold, but you’re still warm, and a bit cuddly on the inside from all the excitement of what you’re doing. Tie up the scene that you’ve just completed, maybe lay down a bit of the opening groundwork for the next direction you’re going in, and then leave it while you’re still in a good place.
It’s hard, especially when the itch to write is still in your fingers, but trust me when I say that you’ll be saving yourself a lot of grief if you ignore that itch. This way, when you next sit down you’re starting in a place that’s pretty easy, and in the intervening time you’ll have been able to think about the next end point that you’re going to aim for, and you’ll be able to start of with relative ease, and get into the groove faster than if you’d finished when you’d lost puff.
To be able to do this you need to be able to monitor yourself as you’re writing. Let the part of you that’s in the driver’s seat have fun and write it’s little heart out, but let another part of you – that oblique thinking part – hover in the background and watch, ready to take control and stop before you run out of petrol.
4. Start the Next Chapter While You’re Hot
And by “hot” I mean still running on the high that’s got you through the chapter you just finished. Your mind is still in the writing zone; your head is in the game, (I don’t know how many more catch phrases I can squeeze in here, but it’s starting to get cheesy), and while you’re in the right head space, you need to utilise it.
Kicking off a new chapter cold can be one of the hardest things to do, especially if you’re not entirely sure what you want to get out of it, so while you’re still all warmed up from the previous chapter, get a start on the next one before you call it a day. You’ll find that when you return your ideas will come more quickly, and writing will be a good deal easier.
This ties in strongly with my previous point. You need to be smart about where you decide to stop writing for the day, otherwise you can leave yourself in a tricky situation for next time you sit down.
5. Learn to Anticipate Problems
By problems, I’m talking largely of the “OMGWHATHAPPENSNEXT?!?!?!1!″ kind. You know where the next plot climax is, but you’re not so sure about the end point for the chapter you’re currently stuck in.
If you can see that you’re not sure about where the next end point is, don’t write until you exhaust yourself. When you next stop, take the time between then and when you next write to have a little think about the issue. You don’t necessarily need to think of a new end point, but think about where your characters are, what’s been happening to them, and what might happen to them now. As you start to figure out a plot to flesh out the chapter, a natural end point will eventually reveal itself to you.
With any luck, some, or all of these techniques are of help to you. They’re not intended as fool proof methods for everyone, but they’re what I use to help prevent myself from getting stuck, and they could be a good starting point for you to start figuring out your own techniques.
