Writers’ Block—Is It All in Your Head?

All writers face the inevitable—writers’ block—at some point in their careers. For some it’s a passing state of affairs, a sort of down time after working furiously on a big project. But for others, writers’ block can be as deadly as a fear of heights. In fact, it often results from a fear of success.

But writers’ block doesn’t just happen. Usually something triggers it, much like any other psychological condition. And, yes, it is psychological. To keep from falling prey to this condition, you have to keep your mind active.

The most common cause of writer’s block is trying to make your writing perfect the first time. Many beginning writers plod through whatever they’re working on agonizing over every word. You want to make whatever you’re writing your best, so you go back and revise every sentence as you go. Instead of trying to write the final draft, work faster and steadily to complete your first draft. Get everything down on paper and don’t worry about grammar or the words you’re using. You’ll be able to fix both in the revising process. Leave sparkling writing until your second or third draft.

Another thing that seriously affects novice writers, and many veteran ones, is hearing the opinion of others. Don’t allow yourself to be stymied by what your friends, family, or spouse may think of what you’ve written. And worst of all, don’t show your writing to strangers until you have finished the final draft.

If you write fiction, you should be doubly careful about showing your work to others before its time. As a fiction writer, you have only your own experiences to draw from for your stories. If your story centers around characters who are uncomfortably similar to people you know, you could find yourself in trouble.

Whatever people say, it will affect you. Beginning writers have thin skins and aren’t used to criticism, whether it’s constructive or not. Particularly harsh criticism can cripple you mentally, causing you not to be able to write.

To combat writer’s block, there are a few things you can do.  Keep several projects going at the same time. The more involved you are in different types of writing, the less likely you’ll be to be stymied by writer’s block.

Another trick is to re-read what you’ve written most recently. You’ll be amazed at how you’ll react to your own words, especially if you haven’t seen them in a while. Besides reading your own work, try reading books, stories, and articles written by others.         
    
Create an idea file. A stockpile of ideas will give you plenty to write about, should you get stuck on your current project.

You might also try to set a word quota—writing so many words a day. This will force you to move forward and not get mired in your current work. And reward yourself for achieving your daily word goal. This could be a walk around the block or a cup of coffee at a local coffee shop.

Finally, be positive. Negativity about your writing will definitely lead to a block.

When Writing and Your Busy Schedule Collide

Every writer perceives the writing process in a differently way. For some the classic rhythm of “Write, edit, revise” is their mantra, for others  order out of chaos rules. But the writing process is flexible, so you can make it serve you by creating your own process.

However, at some point, your busy life and your writing will collide. This leaves you with two ways to go. Become a hermit or get proactive with time management.

Forget choice number one. Do not become a hermit. Isolation will eventually work against you. Don’t remove yourself from your friends and family They will play a major part in the things you achieve. Instead, daydream and seek inspiration whenever you have a moment where getting lost in your ideas won’t be a hazard.

When it comes to making the most of your writing time, there are ways to improve the amount you write, and still have time for your life. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to just  sit down at your favorite place when you have a moment of free time and begin to write. You’ll find this haphazard at best. Instead, schedule your writing just as you would exercise or meals. If you plan on writing say for an hour three times a week, then you’ll look forward to those sessions.

To make the most of the time you do have, you must learn to shut off distractions like Facebook. In order to keep everyone tuned in all the time, Facebook does something pretty sneaky. It may or may not insert a post in your news feed. This causes you to constantly be looking to see if you missed anything. That’s a major distraction which is beginning to cause anti-social behavior in many people. Also, turn off your cell phone. Let voice mail take your messages. That’s why you have it. Now that you’ve eliminated some major distractions, it’s time to write.

Basically writing is one word followed by another. But if you haven’t planned out what you’re going to write, you’ll only get a mish-mash of words that mean little or nothing. Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, a little planning and forethought, you can accomplish a lot in a little time.

Professional writers know all too well that planning makes their writing and their life easier. Planning can take many forms. You could begin by creating an outline or you could simply block out what you plan to write. The latter form actually works well for many writers because it allows them to get creative in the process without going off track. If you plan too much, you’ll confine yourself to rigidly and that tends to block creativity.

When it’s time to get back to work, school, chores, eating or sleeping, or whatever else you have to do, remember to pack along a notebook to jot down any ideas that may pop into your head. Wherever you go, inspiration will follow, so be prepared for it.

When you finally sit down to a serious writing session, don’t write too long. Allow time to get a snack and to give your mind a break. Those little breathers will help refresh your brain and actually make you more productive.

Remember, its balancing your life and your writing that’s important. Don’t let your life overwhelm you. Your writing will surely suffer. And the opposite is true. Too much writing will put you out of touch with life around you.

Is Writing a Book All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

It seems most beginning writers want to write a book. Some of them start out doing that without ever having written anything else for publication. Why is that? It could be that “authors” seem to get the most exposure. When was the last time you remember the name of the writer of an article or short story?  Probably never. But readers tend to remember and talk about those who write books. Remember, not all writers are authors but all authors are writers.

Perhaps it’s the title of author that seems to get more respect. Have you ever been at an event where someone asked you what you did? If you said that you’re a writer, they probably asked what you’ve written. If you only had written a short article on tips for winterizing your home, they probably wouldn’t be impressed. But turn that into a book on whole house maintenance and their ears will probably perk up.

So before you dive into writing your first book, think about the mistakes lots of beginning writers make.

First and foremost, don’t start out writing a book. It’s a huge project that will use every once of writing skill you have. Start out small writing articles or short stories. Get used to writing, itself, and improve your writing and thinking skills. Remember, an average non-fiction book equals perhaps 10-25 articles. A novel equals even more short stories. A book is so big that you may forget the beginning before you get to the end. So you’ve got to develop your planning skills as well.

Some people say not to tell anyone about your book. That’s rubbish. Discuss your idea with close friends or family members. Listen to what they have to say about it, but don’t necessarily take their advice. What you decide to do is totally up to you. However, too many beginning writers think that if they talk about what they’re doing, someone will steal their idea. As a writer, you should have lots of ideas and variations on them. But your friends and family aren’t about to steal them. Talking about your book idea may firm it up in your mind, but don’t talk about it to strangers.

Stay objective while working on your book. This is hard to do. Some writers fall in love with parts of their book. This doesn’t help when it comes to editing later on. And editing doesn’t just mean looking out for mistakes in grammar and such. Editing for continuity and length is an important part of the process. If you’re objective, you’ll be able to delete parts that don’t belong.

If you haven’t done any writing for publication before starting your book, you’re in for a big surprise. Beginning writers often think that the words will just pour out and the book will write itself. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

No matter what kind of book you’re going to write, you must set some realistic goals. Writing a book takes months of hard work, beginning with thinking about it, then intensive research, planning it out, writing the first draft, revising and re-writing, and finally editing. The idea of writing a book in a month, itself is unrealistic. So don’t follow the crowd in NaNoWriMo and plan to write your book come November.

You need to set some long-term goals for your book project and some short-term ones. Know where you want to be on the project in say six months. For short-term goals, set them to write each chapter. Consider each chapter a unit by itself. Also, set time goals. Figure how much time you’ll have to write each day and plan to write for that amount of time, no matter how many words you put down. Even if you write a little each day, it will all add up. Above all, don’t go on writing binges and work for hours on end. Limit the time you write.

Get organized from the start. Create a folder for your book in your computer, then create subfolders for each of the chapters within that. You’ll also need folders for your research within the main folder. Number your drafts to keep them separate from each other. And save your work often. Some word processors, such as Corel WordPerfect, automatically save your work after a certain number of minutes, say 10, that you specify. That means that even if your program crashes, your work is backed up. Otherwise, set a timer to go off on your smartphone every so often to remind you to save your work. At the end of each writing session, also save your book draft on a thumb or external hard drive or to the Cloud if you have that available.

Writing a book is hard work, so make sure you enjoy doing it. Pick an idea that you love and really get into it. Remind yourself why you why you decided to write a book in the first place.

Seeking Perfection

All writers strive for perfection. Some achieve it easily while others struggle to obtain it. For a writer, perfection can take many forms. For some it takes the form of perfect grammar. For others it takes the form of English usage. And for still others it takes the form of content.

The reading public believes that all writers should practice perfect grammar. People are almost unforgiving in this respect. If a doctor slips up on a diagnosis or treatment, the patient doesn’t go back to him or her and correct them. In fact, most patients probably wouldn’t know if their doctor had made a mistake unless he or she said so or something unusual happened.

But with grammar—that thing that everyone studies in school—it’s different. Everyone either uses good or atrocious grammar. For many who perhaps didn’t finish high school or perhaps stopped their education after graduating, daily grammatical mistakes are forgiven—“They don’t know any better.” If a person is college educated, that forgiveness is less forthcoming—“They should know better.” But for writers, for which grammar is a tool of the trade—“They ought to know better.”

Yes, writers ought to know better, but they’re also human. And in conversation, perhaps in the heat of the moment, they may occasionally make a grammatical mistake.

English usage is right behind grammar. Writers seek to practice correct English usage, but with styles changing every five years or so, it’s hard to keep up with what’s acceptable or not. Readers forget that today’s writing style is vastly different from say that of the early 20th century.

Unfortunately, a lot of writers, stylistically speaking, are still back in the mid-20th century. Some will tell you that’s the way they learned to write in school, and so they continue using outdated English usage. A good example is the use of dashes. Today, readers are more visual, therefore writers use dashes more often to visually separate information from the main body of the text.

Another example is the semi-colon. While businesspeople and academics still hold on to using this form of punctuation, many of today’s writers opt to forgo using semicolons. Instead of joining two thoughts with them, they create two separate sentences whose similar content joins them automatically.

Lastly, writers strive for perfection in their content. Not only should sentences be complete and logical, but thoughts and ideas need to be, also. In a shorter piece, that’s usually not a problem. But when a writer is working on a book, a play, or a screenplay, he or she can lose sight of where they’re going. And if they don’t check for consistency once in a while, they may lose their readers as well.

Perfection for most writers comes during the revising and rewriting process, after they’ve finished writing a piece. But going over and over a piece, constantly revising it, can do more harm than good. Too much revising is as bad as too little. Trying to be too perfect can ruin a good piece of writing.

For many writers, perfection comes after working on many pieces. Each one adds to a writer’s overall sense of perfection. To be a perfectionist too early on can stifle not only a writer’s creativity but his or her ability to write.

It's Hard to Let Go

Just as in any serious relationship when one of the partners becomes disinterested or turns their attention to someone else, it can be hard for the other one to let go. The same applies to writers who become seriously attached to their work. As a professional, you can’t let this happen.

You must learn to step back and look objectively at anything you write. Beginning writers get caught in the trap of thinking that everything they write is good when actually it’s all probably pretty bad. That’s a hard pill to swallow for any writer.

Repeated rejection will often try to point you in the right direction, but most beginning writers ignore that signal. Instead, they blame the editor or whoever gave them the last rejection. Some, perhaps you, repeatedly show their work to others hoping that someone will finally say what they want to hear.

It’s doubly hard to let go of writing if it’s good. Perhaps you put long hours into it. If that’s the case, you may be reluctant to delete it for content or continuity. It doesn’t matter how long you labored over a section. In the end, you have to ask yourself if it’s contributing to the overall storyline, or in the case of an article, to the slant. If it isn’t, then it needs to go.

So where does this idea of hanging on to some of your writing come from? Most likely from school. In fact, most of your bad writing habits developed there. This isn’t anyone’s fault. In fact, you probably absorbed this idea from your teachers. It’s a common thing in academic circles to be possessive of your work.

It’s especially hard to cut sections from books. When working on a longer manuscript, you can lose sight of the bigger picture. You need to keep the whole project in mind and be relentless in our deletions. Whatever doesn’t contribute to the whole concept must go.

To put a positive spin on this problem, you might consider saving what you’ve cut to use in
separate stories or articles. These could be spin-offs or completely different pieces.

When you begin revising, be sure to save your work with a different file name each step of the way. All you have to do is add a number—2,3,4, etc.—to the project’s file name. That way you can always go back and review or possibly use what you originally passed over.

A good way to get some distance from your writing when you’re having a particularly difficult time cutting sections from it is to put it aside for a time to get some perspective on it. Not consciously being aware of your story, article, or book, will let your mind forget it. When you finally do go back to it, you’ll see it with fresh eyes. And your eyes are the one that should see it, not someone else who can only give you their subjective opinion.

As a professional writer, you need to develop good editing skills, so you can decide what form your writing should take. It’s not the reader’s job. It’s yours.

Discipline Can Be a Good Thing

Discipline is all important to becoming a successful freelance writer—self-discipline, that is. No one will scold you for doing something wrong. You have no boss. You are the boss. So the only way you’ll get anything done is to make yourself tow the line.

To get ahead, you need to control the elements that might play havoc with your work schedule. To do this, you’ll need to anticipate problems and prepare ways to counteract them so your work won't suffer. The way to do this is to recognize patterns.

Keeping a daily or weekly journal for the first year or two of your freelance venture will help you see patterns developing. By writing down your progress—both the good and the bad things—you’ll begin to notice that they form patterns. Once you recognize the patterns, you’ll be able to take measures to break your bad ones and take advantage of your good ones.

Professional writers know all too well the pattern deadlines follow. Like trucks on a superhighway, they seem to travel in packs. It doesn't matter that you've planned them to arrive at intervals. They overtake each other and you if you don't remain vigilant.

Knowing this, professional writers build tricks into their planned writing time to minimize deadline crashes. The first step in this process is to create a Work-in-Progress chart or spreadsheet. For each project, create columns with the following headings (for non-fiction): Job Name, Publication, Query Written, Query Sent, Deadline, Research Completed, First Draft Completed, Revising Completed, Manuscript Sent, Date Sent, Payment Received, Date Received. If you write fiction, just change the headings accordingly. Then check off each item as you complete it for each project.

Let’s say you have three simultaneous deadlines. To avoid wasting time, do something for each job. Perhaps for Job No. 1 you’ll begin searching the Web for information on your topic. For Job No. 2, you’ll concentrate on interviews. And for Job No. 3, a relatively easy article, you’ll begin writing the first draft.

Professional writers follow this simple rule: As soon as you have a firm assignment to produce, take the first step immediately. By doing so, you’re on your way. The other steps follow without requiring anywhere near the effort of the first. In the case of writing a book, try starting with the easiest chapter first, no matter where it is in the book, then work on the others.

Once you've recognized patterns in your own working habits, you, too, will be able to do as the pros do. For example, you might devote your early mornings to the toughest writing chores because you know this is your most creative time. If you’re at your creative peak at some other time during the day, you should adjust your work schedule accordingly. During this time, you shouldn’t allow anything or anyone to interrupt you. With the heavy-duty work out of the way, you can devote your afternoon hours to making necessary phone calls, trips to the library, online research, or bookkeeping.

Another trick to help your self-discipline is to set a timer or alarm clock as you approach your chores. Break the job, whether it's actually writing the text, revising and editing, or diving into a pile of accumulated research, into reasonable segments, then set your timer and work against it. You'll be amazed at how much you you’ll be able to accomplish with the clock ticking away.

Yet another way to keep the work flowing is to create a daily or weekly to-do list. As you complete each chore, cross it off. At the end of the day or week, you’ll be surprised at how much you’ll get done.

Or you could compare your output with that of a more successful writer. Keep track of how often his or her byline appears not just in the markets where you'd expect to find it, but elsewhere, too. Is this writer getting into a new and promising field? Perhaps it’s time for you to consider opening up new horizons for yourself?

Also consider enlisting the help of a close friend. Tell your friend about a particularly ambitious project you're thinking about starting. Explain you're really taking a chance and that you may need reminding, now and then, about how you’re doing. If you’re friend asks “How’s that book idea you told me about coming along,” you’ll have to answer honestly or feel guilty afterwards. Be sure to choose a friend that’s action oriented, otherwise you may find yourself just talking about your plans instead of carrying them out.

All writers have ways of tricking themselves into the proper mental and emotional state for high production. Some people require the wolf to be knocking at their door, others just the opposite.
How you discipline yourself to juggle your time and work load may work fine for a while, then suddenly you find what you had been doing is no longer adequate. Your bank balance will immediately register deficiencies in your methods of discipline. Once that happens you'll have to do some fast shuffling of priorities and techniques to keep from going under. Be flexible, but remember that patterns lead to other patterns. And discipline rules.

The Importance of Revising

Writing isn’t only about putting words on paper. It’s really about arranging and rearranging words until they say what you mean. Many beginning writers fail to revise their work. They write a first draft and stop there. While you don’t have to completely rewrite what you write, it’s important to make sure what you’ve written communicates clearly to your readers.

To begin, check your work for misplaced content. This might be as simple as an event that’s out of chronological sync or a misplaced modifier. You may have a dull opening that won’t hold on to your reader’s attention or an ending that doesn’t end with a bang. Whatever you’re problem, a little revising can go a long way.

The most common reason for revising is for length. If you plan to sell to newspapers or magazines, you need to adhere to their length requirements, not write long diatribes in which you ramble all over the place. Today, the length of most published articles and short stories lies somewhere between 800-1000 words. As the Internet has threatened to take over the publishing world, magazines in particular have changed their layouts to reflect a “Web” look which means shorter pieces.

Start by deleting any unwanted content. Remove words like “very,” for instance. How nice is nice? Very nice. This word does little to advance the information in your work. You get the idea. Also, check to make sure you’re not using the same words and phrases continually. Create a little variety, and by using words that produce a more exact image to your reader, you’ll write clearer as well.

After you’ve deleted parts of your writing, you’ll be left with holes that you’ll need to mend. To do this, you’ll need to write new sentences, combine others. Be careful that you’re not asking your reader to make a leap in information. Never assume your reader knows what you’re talking about.

Another form of revising is a type of refreshing. When a book has been in print for a while, often publishers will ask the author to revise it for a new addition. This can mean new language and perhaps new information. In today’s fast moving world, a lot can happen in five years–an average length of time a publisher waits to revise a book. Travel guidebooks, on the other hand, are usually revised annually or biannually.