The Dread Writer's Block

Up until recently I had no trouble writing my stories. Ideas came fast and freely, the proverbial creative juices flowed uninhibitedly. Then the unthinkable happened. One day I was sitting at the keyboard, preparing to write up a storm for the third volume in the Terrath series, Magic’s Resolve, when my mind went blank. Actually, that’s not strictly true. The usual ideas were floating around my head concerning people and plots, but for some unaccountable reason my brain refused to make sense of them. Frustratingly, I couldn’t bring order to my thoughts, then put them down on paper (figuratively, of course, since the only person I know who still writes using a typewriter is my mother!) as I usually do. Naturally, every author has heard about or unluckily experienced writer’s block. I dismissed it in others as merely an unwillingness to work on their part; a laziness of the fingers, so to speak. Much to my chagrin writer’s block is as real as a heart attack and just as crippling for someone used to so readily putting pen to paper (I know, another anachronism ). Recognizing the problem, I duly researched how to overcome this blight and became bogged down with proposals that ran the gamut from the scientific to the absurd. Suggestions ranged from taking a sabbatical, either brief or lengthy, to arranging your plotline and characters into cue cards and basically playing Happy Families until everything falls magically back into place! Let me tell you that only one remedy irrigated my dry spell: returning to basics. I simply wrote and wrote and wrote, doggedly writing until the words physically demolished my mental obstruction. At the end of the day it matters not if you write a page, a hundred pages, or just a paragraph, maybe even as little as a sentence. Just so long as you write something. Even if the piece comes out raw and rough, it can easily be polished later on. I’m not saying that my method succeeds for everybody. Individuals must nut out what works best for them. For me the trick was to persist, and persistence indeed paid off. This newest post is proof of that.