I Learned Something While I Was Gone

Still tired and still hitting the blogs later than I’d like to, BUT the followers here deserve a little something for hanging in there this long. 🙂

So, what I have today is a little piece of wisdom for writers. What I learned while I was away, but still rerunning my latest drafts in my head, was that my complete writer’s block almost always comes from not liking the direction the story is going.

It’s my subconscious telling me to stop, look it over, and rethink (rework) what’s happening in the story.

No, nothing I’ve tried to write is anywhere near THAT bad, but the meme was funny. 🙂

Thinking back though, every time I’ve hit a case of writer’s block that’s just seemed absolutely insurmountable, that’s been the case. My subconscious simply wasn’t happy with the quality or direction of my work.

I’m writing about it because that MAY be true for some of you also. Once you realize what the problem is, you can develop a plan top work around it.

Ironically, while working on this post, I came across this YouTube video that largely confirmed my intuition:

The video is only a little over 4 minutes long, but if you don’t want to watch it, here’s the synopsis:

Writer’s block is caused by a need to be perfect (or at least really good), and the cure is to give yourself permission to write garbage, and then let it work itself out in the editing and rewrite phase of your work.

If you’re too OCD as a writer to do that, at least stop, take a step back and ask yourself what’s NOT working with the project. Then STOP and listen to the answer from that little voice in the back of your head. From there, you can figure out what changes to make.