Gordon Woolf's Blog

No such thing as "writer's block"?

Talked to a local writers' group today: one of the main questions I was asked was about whether I ever got writer's block. My answer: No. ... but that does not mean writing always comes easily.

When I moved on from the first job I got on leaving school, as a stores clerk (or as it was called "trainee purchasing officer" so they could pay less money) and on to a junior position on a magazine one of the more senior people who had been fairly successful in writing articles and short stories wished me well but said he could never do that. He said that he could write when he felt like it but not on demand. "As a journalist you have to write no matter what you feel like".

That's true, and I have never had serious problems. However there are several tricks of the trade.

1. You do not have to start at the beginning. Start anywhere, with any piece of description that you know ought to be included.
2. If it does not flow, be happy to write individual paragraphs. You can even print them out with plenty of space between then slice them up and try arranging them in any order on the desk, then number the sheets and cut-and-paste them in the original word processor document.
3. Write anything as a first paragraph. You know it will be bad but it may well be that the paragraph that it leads into is better, even to the extent that you can often just delete the first paragraph and start with the second. Many articles and even stories have been improved by deleting the first paragraph.
4. Even if the words are needed in a hurry, leave them for as long as you can -- even if just time for a cup of coffee (which you should make for yourself). A short break may still be enough to bring you back with fresh thoughts.
5. If you are not happy with the result, hand it off to someone else. In newspapers there is no shame in telling a copy editor that you are not happy with what you have produced. If you are in a less organized workplace make sure that you know at least one other writer who will look at what you have written and be honest in telling you what is wrong... and do it quickly. You can do the same for that person when he or she needs it.
6. If a word eludes you, write around it. You might find that your prose is better for a simpler vocabulary, or you might find that, having made it unnecessary, the word pops into your mind.

Despite my denying "writer's block", there is a problem which can be just as difficult: procrastination. Often I find it difficult to get a job done without a deadline, and a self-imposed deadline might not work.

The answer can be to promise someone else, such as an editor, that the job will be done by a specified time. You then know that should you fail, there will be much less chance of having items published in future. In writers, as in many other jobs, reliability can be one of the most important abilities.

Software for novel writers and others

An Australian novelist and programmer, Simon Haynes, has put together the kind of software he needed for his own writing needs. You can find it at http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter5.html and it is free.

I suspect it will also meet the needs of others who, like novelists, need to move text around and to keep track of facts and descriptions in what they are writing. I use an outliner, but have never been happy with the outliners built in to Word and OpenOffice. They just let you give an item a subheading and then open and close the subheads to add and edit the text under them. If you move a subheading then all the associated text moves with it, and is surprising how often an idea which you thought was best in one section or chapter needs to go somewhere else.

The advantage of Ywriter is that you can make separate notes of where you think your ideas are going. In use by a novelist this will include sections of facts about characters and places etc so that you do not change a character's eye colour or have them change venues impossibly fast.  and installs quickly.

I don't think I'll ever write the great Australian novel. It's been said that inside every journalist is a novel and that with any luck that's where it will stay. But this could be useful in helping keep track for what I do write. I'll certainly be playing round with it a but more, and will also have to check the library for Simon's Hal Spacejock comedy scifi books -- there are four of them, distributed by Penguin.

The software will not replace your word processor, but it may help more than novelists in organising ideas into words before they make their way to the word processor, just as they then eventually make their way to a page layout program.