I’ve never really understood writer’s block. Or, at least not in the middle of a project. Typically my problem is being unable to stop ideas. I seem to have an obsessive-type of focus that comes when I’m really into something.
In graduate school, I was writing a collection of short stories for my master’s thesis. Time was getting short and I was pounding out stories as quickly as humanly possible. I found myself thinking about the story collection almost every waking hour. A trip to the post office would yield an interesting image of a grown man crying as he dropped a letter into the box. A quiet hour at work would yield a question about a woman employed fulltime to dust books in a library. A few minutes in the grocery store would have me thinking about a story involving a deli worker and a woman who complained that the roast beef was never sliced thinly enough.
There were moments when I struggled concentrating on the stories I was revising, because I had too many new ideas bouncing around my head.
I’m going through a similar experience now. I’m working on two books that really excite me. And it seems that my every waking hour is consumed by these books. One of them requires a bit of travel and I’m constantly thinking “I could go here this weekend, and there that weekend.” It’s at the point of blocking out any other ideas about anything. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to explore all the ideas that keep popping in my head.
So the point of all this is that if you push through those early, frustrating moments of getting a book started, you shouldn’t fear writer’s block. Push forward in the blind faith that ideas and plot twists will come. Just start writing–anything to put words on the page–because once you get going, the concepts will be there. At least if you’re like me. I struggle in the early stages, but once it gets rolling, I can’t keep the ideas away. Which is both good and bad. But it ain’t boring.
I think I’m the same way when it comes to ideas, but I’d argue that Writer’s Block isn’t defined as a lack of ideas. I think it’s more of whatever it is that winds up keeping you from your writing. For some it’s lack of ideas, for others it’s lack of confidence, for others it’s inability to shut off ideas (for some, shyness may be an El Guapo). For me it’s when I become hyper-judgmental, usually after a long break, and ANYthing I type is immediately judged by some inner critic at the back of my skull as the most awful thing ever penned anywhere ever and my hands jump off the keyboard and I begin to fear my desk.
Anyway, my point here is largely superstitious. Don’t tempt writer’s block. Let’s say writer’s block is a sleeping bear. Even if you’re a master bear-handler, and even if you’ve never once had a problem, and even if you have zero fear of it, I’d still have to advise against swatting the bear on the nose with a switch.
This is a lovely post. At the moment I’m working on a novella whose contents felt like an adrenaline buzz for about two and a half weeks before it died away - the buzz, that is, not the story. Since writer’s block has usually prevented me from giving one of my stories an ending, I’m not going to let my own fear and uncertainty about where the story’s going stop me from finishing it this time.
I very much relate to your writing of :Unstoppable idea’s. I have in the last few year’s went from the average middle class person, to being broke and homeless, my losing everything has so much to do with idea’s. When i stopped working my fourty hour work week job, and started writing i lost friend’s that were once close, and family did not believe in my idea’s. I’ve wrote many short stories, poems, poetry, and journal’s over the last three year’s. Unstoppable Idea’s are great, i think to myself and try to picture this whole other person in me when im in a writing frenzy. My writing over the last few year’s has been very powerfull. I was finally evicted from my country home in the U.P. of Michigan last November 2006. “No money was left.” I sat and wrote so many day’s wishing that i would find my success, but instead i was facing my 30 th birthday with none other then theidea’s that i could write my way thru the struggle. Writing to me is my life now , like the story above of the Unstoppable Idea’s, i to have so many thing’s going on in my mind, i have lived outside of the normal life for the past year, my writing seem’s to have me on a journey, as i have lived and wrote from nearly tenty different place’s and home. My middle class life has passed me up, as i write a poor man today, im still trying to find my success. Unstoppable Idea’s i relate to very well because they are the same dream’s that im trying to achieve!!! J.N.H. 30.