Writer’s Block Party

I’m not going to watch the news, I’m not going to watch the news.  Seriously, the events of the last few days are exactly why I no longer watch the news anymore, why I listen to books in CD in the car, etc.  The ridiculous fear mongering and panic from vocal idiots just pisses me off too much.  I’m focusing on reading everything I can, and writing as much as I can.

On the writing note, let it be said that I do not believe in the dreaded Writer’s Block.  There is no writer’s block, it is a construct designed to excuse our lack of motivation, perseverance, and general laziness.  We get to a point in the story, we feel we’ve boxed ourselves in, and we sit and chew on a pencil for a few hours until lead poisoning becomes a serious concern, at which point we toss up our hands, state, “I have writer’s block,” and go play video games for a few hours.  Or browse LOL Catz.

When I don’t write, it’s a choice I’ve made.  I didn’t write this morning, but that was a choice. I made good progress on my short stories yesterday and read a ton.  Finished the Dragon Riders of Pern (first book) on CD in the car, then read some of the Best of Tor short story collection I downloaded onto my kindle last year.  Really good works in that collection, by the way, I highly recommend you look into getting it.  The robot detective story is so far my favorite of the half dozen plus I’ve read, and I’m only a fifth of the way through the collection.  But I’m probably biased by having finished a fantasy noir novel myself.

There are multiple ways of keeping yourself writing.  When I’m working on short stories, I have a ton ready to go, and write what’s currently inspiring me.  I’m working on a science fiction short about a colony ship caretaker who has medically induced schizophrenia and who discovers a dog living aboard the vessel; a comedic fantasy story about three very old adventurers; a children’s short about a monster that lives under a little girl’s bed; a serious fantasy story about a monster hunter and his young apprentice; another science fiction short about two men who scavenge at an old space ship bone yard in order to find something to sell so they can get off world; and probably a half dozen others in various states of effort.

You can write notes for a story, do some research.  You can write a blog.  You can go back and edit an older story to see if you can spruce it up for publication.  There’s a ton of different things you can be working on to overcome your inability to get past a point you’re stuck in with the story you’re working on, or you can even go back through that story and determine where it went off the rails to get you stuck.  Heck, Merciful has been through a total re-write once already to fix what was sticking me, and the ending was re-written twice more because I still had gotten “stuck” (I had written it, but wasn’t satisfied with what I had written).

Force yourself to write, every day if possible.  Write anything.  But you’re never really stuck, because you can be working on so many different things.  And trust me, its way more satisfying than keeping up with the news these days.