How to Get Out of Your Writer’s Block

There’s a way out of writer’s block… and it starts with complaining.

Picture this: you’re writing something. And all your creativity is flowing out of your brain and onto the paper. You are in don’t-bother-me-I’m-writing mode, and the fly buzzing around you can’t even break your concentration. But suddenly, the most terrible thing that can happen happens: you don’t know how to continue. You’re stuck, at what many call writer’s block.

The writer’s block. What an awful stage to be in. You can perhaps blame it on the fly that was bothering you, but you’re stuck, and you can’t detach yourself from the gorilla glue keeping you from moving forward and finishing that manuscript.

I am a writer, just like any person who writes. I’ve written screenplays, plays, short stories, song lyrics, and poems, and I am currently revising a 90,000-word fantasy novel that I’ve been working on for the past 2 years. And I’ve encountered writer’s block too many times to count. It made me so upset. I didn’t want to be stuck. I wanted to keep writing and finish my novel. But it wasn’t as easy as snapping out of it, so I started thinking.

How can one break free of writer’s block? Could there be a foolproof method out of it? Or would I have to wait who knows how many days or months or years for inspiration to strike?

Well, after a lot of thinking and frustration, I found a solution!

You see, I was all mad because I got stuck in the outline phase of my novel. My novel is told from the perspective of four characters, and I had trouble weaving their storylines into one cohesive narrative. And I wasn’t about to let this writer’s block stop me from completing my outline.

So I opened a document. I named it “Stuck Rants” because I was stuck and I wanted to rant about what I was stuck on. And that’s exactly what I did. In that document, I listed everything that I was stuck on and why. While writing, I wasn’t thinking about what I was writing; I was just laying out all my thoughts, concerns, questions, and confusions.

When I finished listing what was wrong, I started brainstorming random solutions. For example, I realized I did not understand my villain. She was just out there doing bad things, but as I laid out everything she did, I noticed she didn’t have a clear goal. I didn’t know her motivations, making her actions inconsistent and confusing for the reader.

I started writing questions: what does she want? Why does she want that? What abilities does she have? Why does she have those abilities?

And then I started listing possibilities: she wants power because she is a joke in the eyes of her subjects. She has no abilities, which is why she is seen as a joke. She does bad things to gain abilities so she can be respected.

There, I figured that one out. And I did exactly that for the rest of my problems. Importantly, I did not consider whether the ideas that I was coming up with were good or bad. I just wrote and went with whatever came to mind. 

So here are the steps for my method to get out of writer’s block:

1. Open a document.

2. Rant about all the reasons why you are stuck in writing.

3. Ask questions about what story elements you need to know to move forward.

4. Brainstorm a list of answers to those questions. 

5. Evaluate your answers. If you don’t like them, write down why.

6. Repeat the process until you like your ideas.

Why does this method work?

1. Putting everything on paper helps you organize and conceptualize your messy mental stuckness.

2. Self-criticism is often what prevents someone from getting unstuck. This method aims to remove that judgment.

3. If you’re stuck, it’s not a lack of ideas; it’s unanswered questions.

4. Writing is a form of problem-solving. This method lets you identify problems and work through them one by one. In fact, programmers use a similar problem-solving technique called the “rubber duck method”, where you talk about your problem aloud to a rubber duck.

5. It forces inspiration to strike because, after all, inspiration comes from you, not from some random person called Inspiration. So you get yourself unstuck.
   

If you ever get writer’s block again, go through those steps and let all your frustrations out onto paper. Make your creative writing happen instead of sitting there looking constipated while waiting for it.

Good Writing!