I've finally made it to the other side of my writer's block. I'm back to working on the novel, hitting my word count every day.
Thank goodness.
It wasn't any one thing that got me through it, either.
i started reading again, sprinting through two novels that'd been sitting on the To Be Read pile for a good while. They were both excellent, they were both slightly outside my normal genre, and they were both kindling to re-light the writing fire inside me.
I leaned into my schedule disruption, which meant calling a halt to my exercise routine for a week. I know, you're not supposed to do that; it's the exact opposite of the advice most folks give about writer's block ("take a walk", "clear your head", etc). But it helped me to relax, to feel like I had all the time in the world to write, which made it that much easier to find my flow.
And I read a few chapters in the new Pocket Workshop book by the Clarion West Writer's Workshop. Specifically, Eileen Gunn's chapter on writer's block calmed me down significantly. It reminded me that blockages happen, and pushed me to interrogate it, rather than ignore it.
By forcing me to really look at why I was blocked, to listen to what the block was trying to tell me, I found my way forward. I realized that the novel section I was working on wasn't working, really, and that's why I was blocked on it. It was too passive, for one. Where the previous flashback section was very much driven entirely by the narrator's actions, the current section was one where a lot just happened to her. Or where she stumbled across things, and reacted to them. It wasn't compelling, and my subconscious knew it, but my conscious mind wanted to carry on like nothing was wrong.
So my subconscious went on strike. Writer's block.
I spent a few days brainstorming ways to change the section, to make it driven by the narrator. And suddenly my writing brain kicked back into gear, generating conversations and visualizing scenes again. Not all of them lined up, but that's ok, that's part of the process.
In the end, I decided to trash the 5,000 words I'd written for the current section of the book. Goodbye, gone.
And started over.
But now, this time, the words are coming much more easily. I can sit down in the morning and get my word count in, without worrying about being blocked, or not knowing where I'm going. The narrator -- the protagonist of this section -- is back firmly in control of things, and that's how it should be.
Instead of somehow wandering from Central Asia to Europe, she's fleeing there, from the consequences of her own actions. Instead of stumbling on a town with a dragon problem, she's seeking it out, because it's the only way she can keep a powerful curse at bay.
She still faces constraints, of course. But the way she overcomes her challenges within those constraints is her choice, no one else's. And that...that makes it a lot easier to write down her story.
What about you? Have you had a period of serious writer's block, that you then worked through? How did you overcome it?
