Tag: writer’s block

Overcoming Resistance

Motivation and the Writing Life, Tools for Writers, Uncategorized

by Joel D. Canfield, @JoelDCanfield

To begin, tell me a little bit about yourself. How many of these have you experienced in your writing life during the past two years? I’ll include checkboxes so you can keep track.

Never finding the time to write
Making the time but not writing
Dreaming of writing but never getting started
Starting but never finishing
Starting but never finishing that one particular piece
Thinking you can do it without help
Thinking you’re beyond help
A love/hate relationship with your writing
Focusing on unhelpful negative feedback and ignoring positive feedback
Focusing on positive feedback and ignoring helpful negative feedback
Wanting to write deep but writing shallow
Writing for others instead of yourself
Writing for money but not treating it like a business
Reading about writing instead of writing
Seeking out feedback before you’re ready
Seeking out the wrong level of feedback
Ongoing health challenges like
Unexplained fatigue (physical or mental)
Mysterious illness (a neverending or recurring cold or flu)
Injuries (constant little accidents)
Addiction of any kind (substance, activities, self-destructive habits)

How many did you check? (Put the number right here)

Is it more than zero? I’ll bet it is.

If so, you’re facing Resistance.

I’ve written nearly 20 books and 200 songs in the past 11 years. I checked 17 boxes. SEVENTEEN.

I’m facing Resistance.

You’re facing Resistance.

Resistance? What’s That?

According to bestselling author Steven Pressfield in his groundbreaking work The War of Art Resistance is the mental and emotional pushback we feel when we dare greatly by being creative. It is our unconscious mind protecting us from what it thinks is the danger of emotional vulnerability. It shows up in all the ways in that checklist above, and more.

Resistance is a bully. It will stand in your way and stop your writing. It will knock you down and hurt you, emotionally, even physically.

Resistance strikes nonfiction and fiction authors alike. (Memoirists, are you listening?) Writing a nonfiction book is still a creative endeavor and will expose you to the same fears.

It will stop you from writing using the tools you checked off in that list above.

It’s Not Just You & I

“I was ashamed. I have spent a good many years since—too many, I think—being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who as ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent.”
“. . . in my heart I stayed ashamed. I kept hearing Miss Hisler asking why I wanted to waste my talent, why I wanted to waste my time, why I wanted to write junk.”

Who was this loser?

Stephen King. Stephen 350 million books sold King.

This is a quote from his On Writing which, although not precisely instructional, is the most inspiring book I’ve read when it comes to staying the course as a writer.

This is the quote that gave me my writing life back. (I’ll tell you that story someday if you like.)

Our inborn desire to have our work respected can lead to problems if we put what others believe about our “God-given talent” ahead of what we choose to write. It’s one of many ways Resistance twists natural feelings into quicksand.

What’s a Writer to Do?

You cannot defeat Resistance once and be done with it. It’s part of our mental and emotional makeup. What you can do is make it irrelevant. Note that I don’t say “ignore it” because you can’t ignore a bully. But if you defuse them, do things to take away their power, they are no longer a threat. Like the bully at school (or, frankly, in the office) they still show up every day. But we don’t have to keep giving them our lunch money.

Being a writer is hard. You don’t have to do this alone.

Too many writers face the emotional struggle to write without proper support. After years of writing about it, I’ve created a forum to help writers and artists deal with writer’s Resistance.

It’s not going to be a collective moan-fest or chat-fest. It’s a guided learning environment, a community of writers making a safe place for some “you’re not alone” emotional support. It will also cover practical and actionable tools and processes to get you writing and keep you writing.

Membership is $5 per month or only $25 for the whole year. Questions? Comments? Shout ’em out below and I’ll answer every one.

Battling Writer's Resistance (via @JoelDCanfield ): Click To Tweet

Confidence is Key to Eliminating Writer’s Block

Motivation and the Writing Life

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @Elizabethscraig

When I hit rough patches (and I do nearly every book), I keep going without feeling blocked. That’s because I’ve done it before. Every couple of books I seem to hit a major issue. It becomes less of an issue because I realize I can power through it. Whether I fix the issue then or fix it in the draft, I know it will be fixed. I know that the story will end up turning out fine.

This is true in other arts, as well. I saw an interesting video that Open Culture posted online. It depicts legendary B.B. King, with the confidence of a lifetime of performing, changing out a broken guitar string in the middle of a performance at the Live Aid concert in the mid-eighties.  Without missing a beat, he fixed his broken string in front of a crowd of 80,000 people.

At the same time I was watching the video, I was in the middle of reading actor Bryan Cranston’s autobiography, A Life in Parts.  He echoed what I’d noticed with the B.B. King performance (p. 133) about the importance of confidence as a professional artist:

“This whole business is a confidence game. If you believe it, they’ll believe it. If you don’t believe it, neither will they. Today, when I’m in the position as a director to hire actors, I don’t feel entirely comfortable hiring someone who doesn’t emit confidence. If an actor comes in, and I feel flop sweat and need from them, there is almost no chance I will hire them. Not because they are untalented, but because they haven’t yet come to the place where they trust themselves, so how can I trust they’ll be able to do the job with a sense of ease? Confidence is king.”

What if you don’t have confidence through experience? What if you’re not yet at the point, as Cranston says, that you trust yourself?

The obvious answer is to continue writing.  But I think that other things can help, too.

Keep reading and see how other writers succeed and fail (especially in your genre).

Note your successes each day to make your progress easier to track.

Finish what you start writing.  This helps build confidence that you can at least finish a book, even if it requires major revision.

Have you developed confidence in your writing ability?

Self-confidence is key to beating writer's block: Click To Tweet

Photo credit: Tomek Nacho via Visual Hunt / CC BY-ND

Overcoming Snags and Blocks. And a Few Updates

Business of Writing

By Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

A favorite blog topic among writers is writer’s block.  I can’t imfile7521243186318agine how many articles I’ve seen on the topic…from the debate over whether it actually exists, to how to combat it if it does.

I believe that sometimes I’m experiencing more of writer’s hesitation than a writer’s block. My hesitation usually results from one of a couple of reasons.

One common reason for my hesitation is that my story has hit a snag of some kind.  I’m reluctant to work on the story because there’s something wrong with it.  Since I don’t allow myself to avoid writing, it means I have to immediately diagnose what’s wrong.  Usually I’m finding the scene boring or redundant in some way, or else I realize something is off with my character motivations.  During first drafts, I don’t fix problems.  So I flag the part in the story where I’ve realized things were going wrong, make a note of the change(s) that I’m making going forward, and pick up with the story as if the problem had been fixed in the previous pages.Continue reading

How to Avoid Staring at a Blank Screen

Motivation and the Writing Life

by Mickie Kennedy, 

We’ve all been there. You have to write SOMETHING, but there is literally nothing going on or your brain. You’re tired, feeling fried, and that blank screen is just staring you down. For those of us writing blog posts or marketing material for a recently published book, it can be particularly hard to be creative when you feel that there’s no real news to share.

Stop stressing! This post will go over some tried and true strategies to relieve writer’s block, and provide some prompts when you think your content well has run dry.

Typewriter

If You’re Simply Blocked…

WIRMI Technique – Sometimes writer’s block rears its ugly head because you aren’t quite sure about your topic yet. Now is the time to finish the phrase “What I Really Mean Is…” (i.e. WIRMI.) Once you’ve answered this question, your content should flow much more readily.Continue reading

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