getting over "writer's block"

some here have shown creative talent through The Workshop or otherwise (i was debating posting this in there), and i thought this might help those artistically inclined

full article

there will be a second part to this article at the link, though i couldn't tell you when

That is certainly a good piece of advice. While you don't want to get so bogged down in details that you lose sight of the broader picture, often the best way to get things down is to break it into little sections.

Another piece of advice I could give would be to not get too possessive. Certainly you should create the best you can, but always be willing to change something or even cut it entirely if it is not working.

Red --> Workshop.

haha i figured it would end up here. my bad

I don't know that I ever did any of that. I just wrote. In fact, one of the things I least like to do is outlines. When I'm writing for myself, I know where I'm going, and if I take a few extra side trips on the way, I eventually end up where I intended. It's the difference between following a map and just taking any road to get there.

If I get blocked - usually for no more than a day or two - I'll do something that requires physical effort but leaves the brain free. Garden, paint the living room, clean a closet. That usually loosens the bottleneck. If all else fails, I go back to writing in long-hand.

Everyone's different, though. The important thing is to remember that there are no rules, and what works for the author of this piece may or may not work for you.

I agree about outlines. The only time I ever use them is when I'm doing an essay for school, which then makes writting the paper easier. But if it's a short story or something, I just let it flow. If I get stumped, I take a break, walk away, and do something else for a while to clear my head.

i love outlines when writing school papers, unfortunately many of my instructors did not think this was as good as their method.

this article seems like more of a self-esteem boost to be able to not only write, draw, paint, etc. but present it to others for opinion/critic.

I've been "writing" a lot for my story, but in a very untraditional way. I've been just jotting down the pieces of this world in my story, what animals there are, what the political system is like, and who is allies with who, as well as who are sworn enemies of each other.

I found that this is actually helping when I DO eventually sit down and write something about the main story. Characters, events, and especially the culture of the setting are much more defined and developed.

^Those are hooks. Hooks are good. Sometimes you can jot a word or two and it'll trigger a whole stream of consciousness later.

It's also backstory, which if you've thought it out that thoroughly should make your story more consistent and believable.

I've never talked to a single writer who believed there was such a thing as "writer's block".

Just people who don't realize that writing is actual work, is all.

There is that. My favorite are the Gonnabes. "I'm gonna write this book someday, as soon as I..."

• change jobs
  retire
  get my kid in school
  upgrade to a better computer...

Usually it's "upgrade to a better computer." Once had someone describe to me in loving detail the exact setup he "needed" to have before he could start writing, and I'm thinking, Yeah. Like Melville needed a 4K custom job in order to write Moby Dick.

Of course, Melville had a wife to recopy his scrawl into readable prose, but that's beside the point. Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago on cigarette paper...

See, i'm trying to write a book....I have the prologue and the first chapter...and i know where i want the story to go..i'm just stuck as how to get there....everytime i sit down to write....i just get stuck....i can't get figure out how to get from where i'm at to the end. and it's kinda pissing me off. How exactly am I supposed to get over that?

If you know where you want the story to go, you probably have some scenes in your head that would fall further along the timeline than where you are now.

Try writing one of those scenes, then using it as a hook to pull yourself along.

I'd rather need a recipe against procrastination...

motivation + free time

Thing is, if your Day Job requires a lot of psychic energy, there's only so much left for creative stuff. I know when I was teaching, I couldn't write at all.

I absolutely believe in writer's block.

All it is is an inability to focus enough on your project without getting sidetracked by other matters.

Writer's block is when you're staring at that blank sheet of paper (or empty Word document) and the only thing going thru your head is "nanny-nanny-boo-boo!"

For me, I just keep writing and writing and writing. Write out every single thing that person does. Make it James JOyce's Ulysses. YOu can always cut things out after.

These characters should be real people, remember. So if a character needs to get from A to B, what would that character do that would bring them from A to B? And if you can't write a scenario where they would get to B, then maybe that character should be going to C instead.

So far, this completely and totally works! Listen to that /\. I feel like I've developed a lot of the story/universe just writing little pieces.

My story involves multiple plot lines, and jumps back in time to tell the audience about what happened before the main story happened. It's kinda hard to convey to the reader that this chapter is something that happened in the past.

Also, there is a part of the story where I DON'T want the audience to know in what era it is in. That, I find, is quite hard to convey.

The best advice I can give you Mandi, is a quote I got from Anne Lamott:
Writing is like driving at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Then there's the trick of writing scenes out of sequence. One Editor told me when I was stuck, to write either a sex scene or a death scene, because these things are going to appear in your book.

^That is a fantastic quote! It's exactly like not being able to see beyond the headlights.

I guess different things work for different people. When I read that quote, I have a strong impulse to say, no! If you can't see beyond the next patch, you're doing it wrong -- you need to figure out how the whole text works before you can formulate bits and pieces! Do it bit by bit, and you'll likely never finish it, or it won't be any good if you do... but obviously, if garamet agrees then that is proof that the method works well for some.

What kind of bothers me about such major discrepancies is that I also have to advise beginning writers in my job; while I have a good track record, I don't know if I'm giving a young garamet exactly the wrong advice when I tell her to figure out the whole and work down from there until she is sure of each word's function in the essay or book before she writes it.

^It's primarily about the small stuff. Yes, you need to know where you're going to end up before you even start. But it's the daily "How do I get from here to there?" that's the challenge.

And sometimes it not only feels as if all you can see is a few hundred feet of the road ahead, but you wonder if just out of range of your headlights there's either something lurking with a chainsaw, or a sheer drop off a cliff.

That's how I saw it too. But Stephen King disagrees: in ON WRITING (highly recommended!) he tells the reader how he does it - he simply starts writing without a plan. Creates characters, lets them do something, and while he writes, they 'take over' in his head and he can see with their eyes (this is highly paraphrased). Then he starts doing things to them and gets them into all those situations.

While I do believe him, I think he's bluffing a bit. I can totally see IT or MISERY being written that way, it's probably not possible to write something like THE STAND without any kind of a plan.

Hopefully anyone you're advising knows better than to rely exclusively on one person's input. It's not hard to find experts in any field who will advise noobs to go in completely different directions. You have to weigh all advice carefully and determine for yourself what's most likely to work for you. For instance, I've always heard that you should write your entire work (regardless of length) straight thru before doing any editing or modifying. Garamet has said she does the opposite, playing with things every time she does a read-thru of what she's done lately. Obviously it's worked for her, as she's been published many times.

Much less his magna opera, The Dark Tower series.

I think you mean "magnum opus".

I thought that if there were multiple works it became a magna opera, not a magnum opus... though reading through that I see why I was confused. Magna opera refers to multiple magnum opuses and not multiple works within.