What Can You Write When You're Blocked?

Writer's block. Or maybe we could call it writer's agonized paralysis or writer's internal annihilation. Some real writers say they've been through it, others say it's an imaginary condition.

In my imaginary life, writer's block is a fact of it. Oh, the creeping horror of it all! The days when even thinking about sitting down to work on a writing project has me on the edge of panic. The times when my mind insists that a perfectly sound writing idea I've been working on is hopelessly bad, and must be abandoned in favor of something with more prospects.

In time the repeated effects of the block put my self-esteem in the bargain basement and below. I mentally re-write my writing history to eliminate the proud moments and magnify the failures. I'm nothing, I'm no one....

I'm a writer. I am a woman made out of stories. I don't know how to be anything else. When I decide to give it all up forever, I am making up new stories in my head within four hours.

Thomas Mann said: "A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

I write like Thomas Mann now.

What can you write when you're blocked? What can you do, right now, in spite of your writer's block? Can you write a poem, a short story, a fanfic, a dirty limerick? Can you write a blog post or a Facebook status update? Do that, then.

But that isn't getting your novel written! you exclaim. True, but any writing you can do outside the novel is a step toward finding a way back into the novel.

Can you scrawl some lines into your journal? Perhaps you can write a few lines of your novel by hand in a composition book during a commercial break during The Walking Dead. Or if you cannot do that, perhaps you can transcribe some handwritten lines of your novel previously written into your YWriter novel file or your Open Office file.

Can you write a to-do list for your day's chores? Perhaps you can do some work on outlining your novel. Perhaps you can even do a full outline using the Snowflake method. You might think, well, what if I can write a full outline, how does that help if I'm too blocked to write the novel? But once you have outlined, you may find you can write the novel, at least a little bit at a time.

This is how to write when you have writer's block. Find things you can write outside the planned novel, and then see if you can't transfer that into your planned novel.

It's hard. It's almost impossible. But you're a writer. That's what makes writing so hard for you. And that's why you do it anyway.

How about you? In what ways is writing more difficult for you than for other people? Do you have any methods for getting around those difficulties?

My page at NaNoWriMo:
http://nanowrimo.org/participants/ilsabein
My Facebook writing page:
http://www.facebook.com/NissaAnnakindt