♲ @kennychaffin@diasp.org:> "I want to dispel some of the myths about Writer’s Block, and undo the mysteries that surround the condition. What’s happening when we feel blocked? What can we do to find our way back to the keyboard? Can we accept Writer’s Block as a potential ally to our creativity?"****"The first thing that needs to be said is that writers get blocked almost constantly. During the composition of this very paragraph, I stopped typing thirty-seven times (I counted), stumped as to what I wanted to say next, and how. I got up and made a snack. I went outside to chase away the woodchuck living beneath our storage shed. I came back inside and turned off the app that turns off my internet and spent a solid half hour researching how to poison a woodchuck."
"I considered what would happen if I poisoned the woodchuck—or worse yet, the baby woodchuck—and my wife found out. I made a bunch of linguistic tweaks, most of which I unmade, before erasing the whole paragraph and starting over. At every phase of this extremely shitty and inefficient process, I was suffering a block, a moment in which doubt and indecision overtook my faith. I am still eyeing this paragraph suspiciously."
Sometimes when I get #writersblock, I think it’s bc I’m trying too hard to write a pretty poem that cheers people up & makes the world seem bright & beautiful & worth suffering through the Human Condition™.
This #poem has several lines I jotted down over the past week & then ignored bc I didn’t want to write something messy. Today I remembered it’s ok to be messy sometimes! So I just wrote what I needed to write, & I feel much better now.
I've been ill the past few weeks & stressed as a result, & it's properly screwed with my ability to daydream & write to the extent that yesterday I had been fully convinced I had lost writing as an interest (the hyperfixations giveth & the hyperfixations taketh away 😭). It really made me sad, especially as I was nearing the end of a long-fic before I became ill & I really want to finish it.
Today I realised I had started randomly composing a nice little scene in my head. Not for the next chapter but for a few chapters down the line. Never been so happy for a random daydream to suddenly appear. 😍
I #AmWriting again for the first time in over a month.
Unfortunately, I had gotten stalled with my most recent project, Spiral Architect. I couldn't get away from the realization that this was basically backstory for a story I could be telling instead, and once I got there I couldn't bring myself to give a shit about the project any longer.
Instead, I'm revisiting a project that had gotten stalled in 2021 when I had learned that my late father had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer: When You Don't See Me. I was over 75,000 words into the project when I had gotten interrupted, and you know what? It's pretty fucking solid even though Christabel's confession needs more work, Naomi's story is half-finished at best, and Morgan's is barely started. It might be worthwhile to show their confrontation with Isaac Magnin from Magnin's viewpoint, too. I haven't really written anything new tonight, though. I'm just going through the old material to refamiliarize myself with it and decide on what needs to be changed.
"A year after the breakup of Crowley's Thoth, its members meet on the night of the Winter Solstice to figure out how it all went wrong, only to learn that the truth sets no one free."
One subject that keeps coming up in various writers' groups online is "writer's block." Over time, I've gathered up some of the best ideas from the replies to those posts, as well as adding in some others from my own reading of successful authors. I've put them all in this article.
Whether you're trying to find new ideas or stuck in the middle of a story, there are solutions here for you.
For the last week, we've been posting about how to deal with #WritersBlock. What worked for Ken? A two-day backpacking trip through the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Forest fires ravaged the area a few years ago.
The pines survived, and there was plenty of new ground growth. It provided a ton of inspiration for Ken's #ElementalApocalypse campaign.
I ran into an interesting "situation" with my #fanfic#writing. I got an idea for a fic, started the fic, got #stuck on the fic, BUT could not continue on anything else.
This fic TOOK UP ALL MY BRAIN ACTIVITY and would not let me work on any other fic until it was done.
My sense of needing to never be seen as incorrect in professional settings turns out to be highly, highly tied to my need to be unambiguously accepted by colleagues while publicly and proudly trans.
Dancing In the Dark - Bruce Springsteen - 1984 (www.youtube.com)
I get up in the evening...