What's your advice for overcoming writer's block? What do you do to overcome it?
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"Writer's block" is usually just boredom, frustration with being unable to solve a problem, or general inability to concentrate, in my experience. Work on something else. Go and read a few books. Take the day off. Get drunk. Listen to some music. And wait.
Not very helpful, is it?
-- Warren Ellis
I've never had it. I just write whatever comes into my head-- I've never been stuck.
-- Erik Larsen
I got this years from a book called None But A Blockhead, by Larry L. King (a writer of nonfiction who got rich and famous by writing the musical Best Little Whorehouse In Texas); it's a memoir of his career. If you can't write, sit at your desk for a predermined amount of time... two or three hours. Tell yourself you don't have to write, but you can't do anything else. No reading, no games, no getting up from your chair, no nothing. Eventually, you get bored and write. This works.
It's harder nowadays, because we're using computers instead of typewriters; distractions are a click away. But you have to keep your promise write or do nothing, either is fine. If it means copying your games and your internet software onto a disk and trashing the hard drive copies... if it means giving the disk to a friend with instructions not to let you have it... if it means buying a typewriter, or going into another room with a notebook (the paper kind)... then that's what you have to do.
-- Tom Peyer
Writer's block is very real, and unquestionably the bane of any writing profession. There are varying degrees and types of writer's block, so the first thing you have to do is establish what exactly has gone wrong between you and the muse.
Very often I find that what's blocking me is personal disinterest in what I'm writing. Mark Waid actually shared an epiphany about this once, and I've found that nine times out of ten this is absolutely the heart of the problem (especially in comics writing, where you have to think up new ideas for stories every month!). Either the characters aren't speaking to me because I haven't delved deeply enough into who they are to find something about them that fascinates me, or I haven't chosen a theme that resonates in any kind of authentically personal way. You are a thousand percent less likely to get stuck when you care about what you're writing. I've thrown nearly completed scripts away upon determining that the theme didn't mean anything to me. It's just so hard to proceed when you're not invested.
A subdivision of this has to do with structural problems in your story -- sometimes if you kind of have a sense that your story's gonna fall apart on page seventeen, you find yourself spending an entire afternoon on page sixteen, panel two, rather than braving the formational black hole on the next page. The trick there, obviously, is to trust your intuition, and back up and rework your outline until you have confidence in your springboard.
If the problem isn't about the story, though, then you have to resort to tricks and muse-bribery. I've found music immensely helpful when I need to occupy my internal critic ("uh-huh, you may be right about page sixteen, panel two, but tell you what -- I really need to move on now, so why don't you listen to this CD and I'll get back to you in the rewrites...?"). Tom Peyer told me he sometimes forces himself to sit in front of the computer, telling himself he doesn't HAVE to write, but he can't do anything ELSE. Denny O'Neil is a big fan of plotting while he takes walks. And, of course, there's always more coffee, more beer, more meditation, or more desperate calls to your friends for reassurance.
If the problem is finding inspiration for a story, then the only answer is to get out and live. Milan Kundera has a brilliant novel called "Life is Elsewhere" -- the title refers to a graffiti message Paris students scrawled on the walls of the Sorbonne in May of 1968 in reference to the too-often apolitical nature of art, and it expresses a problem that runs through all creative enterprises; when you're making pieces of work about life, you are not truly engaged in it. I've spoken in other interviews about the disorientation I sometimes feel when first emerging at crowded conventions after being alone in front of my computer for months at a time. Art -- writing or otherwise -- is just medium. The content must be supplied by you. Write what you care about, and let your passion carry you through.
-- Devin Grayson
Look at my incoming bills and see what I have in my bank account.
That's SORT of a joke.
To be honest, I can't afford writer's block per se but there are times when I become bogged down. That's why I like to have more than one project going. If one gets bogged down, I work on something else. If nothing is coming at all that day, I try to put everything aside and go do something physical, such as clean house or something. If I'm smart, I put everything on the back burners of my mind and do something not related to comics because i'll realize that it just isn't coming. If I'm stupid, I'll hammer away and spin my mental wheels or flog the dead horse, trying to get it to show a heartbeat.
What I DON'T do is get worried that it has "all gone away". I've worked at this long enough to know that some days, the work just doesn't come. Doesn't mean that the "magic" has gone away, it usually just means I'm stressed out or over-tired or something like that. Listening to music helps sometimes. But I don't make it a bigger deal than it is. I know that some ideas need their own time to develop and the story will work itself out in good time.
I don't know if that helps anybody else but it works for me.
--John Ostrander
When I get writer's block, I'll (Deadline willing) walk away for a bit, and pick up a book. Raymond Chandler's writing is always an inspiration, because of his descriptive way with words! I often can unblock by taking a drive in my car, as well, without the car radio on. I tend to think most creatively when I zone out or daydream! In the morning, when I take my shower, I find I get a lot of my best ideas!
-- Jerry O.
Relax, go for a walk, do something so your mind is as far from your story as possible. Just when you forget about it -- WHOMP! -- the idea will jump in your head.
-- Geoff Johns
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Page created by Dave A. Law
Last update: December 28, 2003 |