Hey Gang,
Joe is stuck in an airport in the middle of nowhere today, so I’m jumping in a little early this week.
I wanted to talk about what to do when your brain just won’t kick in and do what is necessary to get the job done. There are days when you just get stuck. Whether it’s your writing, or life in general, you find yourself in a rut and you don’t know how to get out. It can be so frustrating. You might feel overwhelmed or lost. But there is hope. (I sound like an infomercial.) The following two words are all you need to remember when this happens to you.
Move Forward
It’s that simple. Sometimes we get so caught up in the details that we forget to move forward. Sometimes you don’t know what the next scene is, but you might know the one three scenes away, so write that. The idea applies to real life too. Feel like you’re eating or doing the same things every day. Do some little things to change things up. Drink your tea from a fancy china cup, buy a new decorative pillow for the couch or bed that makes you smile. Hire a baby sitter to take your kids out, so that you can stay home and take a nap or take a bubble bath.
These things also help if you’re writing. Sometimes we need to shake up those staid routines and bring a little light back into our lives. I teach that in my Muse class. But I thought, for today at least, I’d focus on what to do when the words just won’t come. This is taken from my FAST DRAFT class. And they are tools/tricks of the trade that I use all the time.
- Move away from the computer and grab a journal and pen. Sometimes writing things out long hand is all it takes to kick that brain into gear.
- Concentrate on a particular character in your WIP (Work in Progress) and write a scene for him or her.
- Move to the next chapter or scene. Sometimes you just get stuck, but you know what you want to write in chapter 20. Cool, write chapter 20. You can go back and write those other pages later. You’ll still be moving forward, even if you write chapter 3, after chapter 20, because it’s new pages.
- Give yourself a time limit of 20 minutes to 2 hours to write. You can’t move away from the computer or paper until your time is up. Your fingers must be typing/writing the entire time.
- Step away and listen to some music, go for a drive, walk around the block. Do those stretches I talked about. Give your brain a moment to relax, and boom, it will be ready to write again.
- Free write something, anything. It doesn’t have to be a part of your book. Free associate with a word, or a picture you see. This kind of diversion can be good because it often leads to a breakthrough when our subconscious demands to deal with the problem we just left. A few moments away can often give you much needed perspective.
- Brainstorm. You don’t have a great deal of free time in this process, but if you have a chance to chat with another writer friend brainstorm with them about whatever problem you might have.
- Make yourself a note and keep writing. There are many times when you’ll see something like this in one of my first drafts: “They kiss, but something happens and there’s an explosion. Something has to happen that yanks them apart for good and then wham.” I write that down, and then later when I see that, my brain instantly knows that to do. It’s almost as if it’s been ruminating on it while I stepped away.
- I don’t encourage a lot of chatter during this, but if you have things that work for you to get you kick-started creatively feel free to share.
- The No. 1 thing that works for me is incentives. If I write 20 pages I get (name your guilty pleasure). It might be Mexican food, ice cream (You see a theme) a movie, a nap (one of my all-time favorites) or a massage (my second favorite). Sometimes it’s chocolate, and sometimes it’s dinner with friends. There is that part of us that always wants a treat when we’ve worked hard. And we deserve it.
So what works for you? How do you get out of your ruts? Tell me, I really want to know.
