Author: Angela Rydell

Writer’s block is both real and a myth. It’s all in your mind—but that’s where it thrives. Fortunately, minds can be changed.

In the right conditions, or “write conditions,” writer’s block can be busted. Those “write” conditions are more than a pun—they’re a mindset change. A strategy of liberation.

Drop “right” from those conditions and simply “write.”

That’s how you break the block. It’s that simple, and that hard.

You can use these steps to do it.

• First, identify what’s in the way.
• Second, lower your standards.
• Third, dredge a channel for your craft.
• Fourth, go deep.

And here’s the fifth and final step, after you return to those deep waters:

• Fifth, own your craft.

When you own your craft, you’re like a navigator on the high waters, interpreting signals, identifying which way the wind’s blowing, watching the color of the sky for what’s on the horizon, adapting as the conditions change. You’re making choices, comfortably in charge. In fact, you’re not even thinking about being in charge. You’re just doing good work.

Sounds ideal, doesn’t it? That’s the dream—to be in the zone, to get to “comfortably,” especially as you ease out of that blocked thinking.

But when you’re coming out of a block, the conditions are anything but comfortable. You may be covered in gunk up through your ears. And come to think of it, we rarely write much at all in “clear sailing” conditions, with the sun at our back and clear skies ahead. Those are the right conditions for a vacation, but they’re not the write conditions for owning your craft.

What if you stopped thinking of the ideal conditions for good writing as smooth sailing? What if the best conditions are actually choppy waters, salt stinging your eyes, and storm clouds gathering. How else can lightning can strike? Am I taking the metaphor too far? Yes, lightning can be bad at times. But what if you became okay with writing when things aren’t so comfortable?

~Read the rest of this article on www.writersinlet.com. Stop over and tell me how your writing’s going, or shoot me an email.

The doldrums of “right.”

A good way to get back to good writing is to get good and honest about those good days. What is it like, really like, when you’re doing good work?

Typically, you’re concentrating deeply—even as the waters get choppy. Often because of them. You’re paying keen attention to all signals in your creative purview as you ponder, process and produce on the page. And when glitches occur, you’re working through them.

In your mind, and often on the page, you’re contemplating ideas bad and good, sentences godawful and grandiose, metaphors mixed and magnificent. Like that navigator on the high seas, you’re using lights to wink strategically, responding to radar that picks up what might be in your way—and may include that squeaky voiced editor who rejected you at that conference a decade ago. Or the distant rumble of your dad’s judgements about how you’re wasting your talents outside marketing.

On the good days, you’re discerning as you create, and the rumbles and voices stay in the background, while you keep self-editing—but doing it so well it doesn’t trip you up. If critical voices weren’t there, including your own self-critical discernment, frankly, you’d be writing dull, bland, thoughtless, unchallenged stuff. Boring stuff, without spark or shine or edge. All oyster, no pearl.

When everything’s perfect, when there are no inner voices questioning, pushing, pulling, the mind lacks impetus for insight.

So on the good days, you’re engaging with the inner critic—it’s not absent. You’re in a mutually beneficial relationship. It gets to push you, and you get to push back. But you’re not getting off course because of it.

Crashing your craft.

Okay, if on the good days you’re avoiding the bad critics and engaging with the good, what about those bad days? The really bad days. What if the worst happens? What if you crash your craft?

You might sink fast. Or slow. Abandon ship. Or get beached on the shore. Is it over?

Of course not. You recover your ship. Or bail yourself out. And you pick yourself up, radio for help to get out of the doldrums. You identify the damage. You put in the repairs—fix the hole in the hull of your craft, mend the sails to catch the wind. It might take days, or weeks. Or just a few hours. Then you go on your way. Often the stronger for it.

And here’s more good news: Even when you crash your craft, you haven’t experienced the worst days.

The truly worst of the worst days? Those are when you leave your craft beached. When you don’t do the work. When you believe what the block tells you, in whatever way it can, that you can’t get your craft up and running again.

But now you have a plan for that.

• First, identify what’s in the way.
• Second, lower your standards.
• Third, dredge a channel for your craft.
• Fourth, go deep.
• Fifth, own your craft.

And when you encounter horns blasting at you, drowning you out until you believe you’re a bottom feeder, that you’re lowest of the low, you’ll keep moving through it because you know those aren’t the “write” conditions at all. Knowing that may help you steer clear of a collision course. Or not. You may crash your craft—again. Then you fix the issue, patch up the damage, or you try the steps again.

And you get back to it. You turn your attention to the signals that help you discern where to navigate next. You toot your own horn when you need to, and blast past the bad when you need to, working your way onward to your destination—doing good work.