Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they can have an excuse to drink alcohol.
~ Steve Martin
Most of us can relate staring down a blank page, whether paper or electronic, willing the words to come. The question is whether writer’s block really is just made up by whiners, or whether it’s a real affliction?
Madelyn Kearns, a columnist at the University of Maine’s “The Maine Campus,” considers the question in a recent article:
This crippling inability to put thoughts to page happens to the best of us. Even writer Ernest Hemingway, whose adventures include running with bulls and time as a war correspondent during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, admitted there was nothing more terrible to behold than a blank sheet of paper.
The fact that so many people face or have faced the great wall of “write me not” would appear to be a valid cause for research and investigation to discover the root to this scholars’ suffrage and expunge it once and for all. Why is it then, that we are still without our Writalin?
Kearns concludes that biology and psychology are so interrelated that they function together. Just as worrying can tie your stomach in knots, so too can it create roadblocks to your writing.
The cure? Do something to shake up your energy and give you a fresh perspective. Try out several different activities to find one that works for you. As Kearns writes:
Just as the symptoms of writer’s block differ from person to person, so does the cure. One respondent in an about.com writing forum found that setting an egg timer aided them in the unclogging of the word nozzle, while non-fiction writer and journalist Tom Wolfe discovered that writing his articles in the form of memorandums helped him fill the page just fine.
Personally, I like doing sit-ups to try to ease the affliction, but whether you take long walks on the beach, write poems in French or sleep your way through the emptiness à la Californication’s Hank Moody, it is up to you and you alone to find your fix.
Steve Martin advises people to stop complaining about writer’s block and start getting out of their rut by modeling successful writing:
Go to an already published novel and find a sentence that you absolutely adore. Copy it down in your manuscript. Usually, that sentence will lead you to another sentence, and pretty soon your own ideas will start to flow.
There. Now you have several activities to try, as well as eleven others in my post “More Writer’s Block Cures from Journaling.”
When was a time that you experienced writer’s block, and what did you do to break out of it? Leave a comment!
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