Writer’s Block-Buster 101: The Fifth Step Is To Own Your Craft

May 3, 2021February 13, 2022

Writer’s Block-Buster 101: The Fifth Step Is To Own Your Craft

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.

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.

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.

April 16, 2021February 13, 2022

Writer’s Block-Buster 101: The Fourth Step Is Deepening the Waterway

Writer’s block can feel personal—as if your writing is giving you the cold shoulder, because you deserve it, you bad writer you. Sound silly? Good. Because you don’t have to take a block so seriously. Sometimes taking it too seriously is part of the problem.

So call it what it is: a block in your thinking. That’s all it is. It may be a fear, a resistance—one that’s been there for a while or popped up yesterday. Either way, that block is a mindset barrier that can be cleared. Use these three steps to work through it:

Identify, lower, dredge. These three steps to channel-clearing mimic the literal act of dredging a waterway, so the flow can go back to normal—or even better than normal—and everything can move freely again.

Here’s a good visualization you can use to get a feel for it: Imagine you’re a dredge-boat captain. You set your craft upon stagnant waters, identify what’s in the way, then go low. Yes, you’re scraping the muck where the bottom feeders lie. That’s how you remove silt and sediment and break the block.

And as you dredge and scrape away, grabbing the gunk, whatever and wherever it is, accepting it for what it is, the flow increases. The channel may even expand and widen.

Then, as you feel that flow moving again, you no longer need to collect the muck. Your priorities shift again.

In that increased flow, find new depths.

Go from freeing the channel from gunk and shallow waters, to deepening the waterway.

Hemingway might say that on your way to those depths, you’re working for what he calls that “one true sentence.” Or it may be one word, then one true phrase, leading to a sentence that brings you to your story’s (or poem’s) true source–and the form it needs to take on the page.

That probably sounds familiar. Even intuitive. Though I’m setting out a step-by-step pattern, I’m not revealing anything new—all I’m doing is bringing your attention to what you already know, and already do.

This is you, shoring up your thoughts, going with that familiar feeling of sorting through the bad material and finding good material, moving through thoughts that slosh about as you write, and again, zeroing in on the good stuff, and this flow of movement.

A part of you knows, in the tips of your fingers on the keyboard, in the synapses of your brain: I’ve been here before. And I know how to test the waters to find that one true word, phrase, or sentence, and use it to go deeper, get to the true source, and clarify my concept. And I can do it again.

The blocks just trick you into thinking you can’t do it again. They may have different names, and come in different shapes and sizes, but they’re blocks just the same.

Just keep working through it, as you’ve done before. Every time you hit a block, follow this pattern of thinking, this process, and you clear a channel for your craft.

Restart, and adjust the flow of your thinking: identify, lower, dredge—then the deepening.

April 1, 2021August 4, 2023

Writer’s Block-Buster 101: The Third Step Is To Dredge a Channel (Under a Full Moon).

So after you’ve identified your writer’s block and given yourself permission to write the worst stuff you can dream up, do some dredging. Hard to feel good about that? Well, you should. You are doing the hard work of slogging through the muck, to get what’s wedged unwedged, what’s backed up flushed. It’s unglamorous, but necessary. You’re cutting a channel through what’s got you stuck.

Your efforts scribbling might feel feeble, like the efforts of those spindly cranes we all saw clawing at the sandy banks of the Suez Canal to free the 200,000 ton Ever Given cargo ship where it wedged lengthwise in the waterway for over a week (back during the first year of the pandemic). But that digging wasn’t as futile as it seemed. Take it from the folks on the Ever Given—every little push and pull helped.

Persist. Do whatever it takes, from digging, pulling, dredging, tugging, reorienting, again and again. And take help from wherever you can get it, and whatever: including the high tide and the full moon, which is what helped the Ever Given get unstuck. Yes, whether you’re a poet or a 200,000 ton cargo ship, the moon, that great influencer, can help free you from what binds you.

And a little necessity doesn’t hurt either. Fortunately you’re not dealing with the pressures of the entire international community expecting their Amazon deliveries on time (and then some). But heck yeah, it’s important to get the flow of your writing back on track so you can keep that supply of good ideas and glorious sentences moving forward, to produce your best work.

Get that inlet between idea and execution free again. You’re cutting and widening the channel between your ideas and the page while holding to the lowered standards you’ve set to keep the flow moving. As William Stafford says:

To get started I will accept anything that occurs to me. Something always occurs, of course, to any of us. We can’t keep from thinking. Maybe I have to settle for an immediate impression: it’s cold, or hot, or dark, or bright, or in between[…] If I put down something, that thing will help the next thing come, and I’m off.

Ah, yes, indeed. It’s as simple and as hard as that: One thing helps the next thing come—and you’re off. “These things, odd or trivial as they may be, are somehow connected,” Stafford adds. “And if I let them string out, surprising things will happen.”

That’s the goal. Dredge out what’s in the way and get traction where it’s needed—not mooring where it’s not. Whether it takes a few minutes, hours, or days, soon, what follows is the payoff you’ve been hoping for: something new.

Right before you, now, is movement. What’s moving the fastest? What’s nimble in the channel before you? Name it. It may be a word or phrase that rings true. An idea that lights up as the words flow. A plot twist, character tension, an unmixed metaphor, the right rhyme the sonnet’s argument turns on.

And here’s some more good news: if it draws you back into your piece, if it helps it make sense, it’s a word or phrase or sentence or idea that’s a part of a whole. It captures something essential about what you’ve been after after all—not just a way back in, but a hint of coherence, a nod towards completion.

Whatever it is that allows you to say “and I’m off,” put it in the place that needs it most. That might be page one, or a link between chapters, or the end of the line.

Then move on to the word, next sentence, and the next. Don’t look back on what blocked you right now—let it float away, towed by tugboats to the Bitter Lakes to meet its fate. Your forward focus is what matters, so you can make sure the channel will be free for the next idea in the supply chain of your writing’s inspiration—and the next, and the next.

March 25, 2021February 13, 2022

Writer’s Block-Buster 101: The Second Step Is To Lower Your Great Expectations.

Is writer’s block real? There’s no brick wall between you and the page, but the barrier can sure feel as imposing, if only in your imagination. And that makes it real enough.

If you’re afflicted, then you’re stuck, wordless, idea-less, perhaps with pen and paper in hand. You’ve shown up to the page with the right equipment—but not the right approach.

You’re there to find the best words and ideas and turn them into something that goes somewhere. What else would you want to write–your worst work? Mediocre work? Of course not. But here’s the kicker: when nothing is forthcoming, when you and the blank page are in a staring match, it’s fine to blink. Accept something. Any something. Even mediocre words. Even bad ideas.

So to bust through writer’s block, give yourself permission to lower your great expectations. You need to get your fingers moving. Tickle the keyboard until it giggles up something silly. Until it burps something wretched or embarrassing. Sputters or moans something drab or funky or weird. Great. Tell your keyboard, thanks, I’ll take it. Ask it to cough up some more. And more.

Yup, this is a “shitty” writing phase, though not quite what Ann Lamott talks about in her “shitty first draft” entreaty. A block can happen if you’re on draft one or twenty-one. In fact you don’t even need to be drafting a thing, and poof, there’s a big pre-draft block preventing you from getting to it.

The solution is the same though: lower your high expectations. Even if they’ve been raised because of years of experience, the draft number you’re on, or that good day you had last week. No matter. Drop back to beginner’s mind: anything goes. Return to exploration mode. Get anything down right now.

Even Pip from Dickens’ Great Expectations, who got what he thought he wanted—wealth and education and a name for himself—came to realize that the humble life he lived before achieving all that greatness, which he looked down on back in the day, wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d thought.

So clack away, even if it just feels like typing. It may be just that. But you may later find it’s not nearly as bad as you thought. And there’s something great about that.

What’s the first Writers’ Block Buster? Find out here:

Writer’s Block-Buster 101: The First Step Is To Identify What Got You Stuck.

March 17, 2021February 13, 2022

Writer’s Block-Buster 101: The First Step Is To Identify What Got You Stuck.

Are you rusty? Maybe it’s been a few days, a few weeks, heck, a few months (dare I say, years?) since you’ve written. And you’ve returned to the keyboard, but something feels funny. You place each index finger, respectively, over the trusty “f” and “j,” then the rest of your digits follow, but settle uneasily. You’re not quite sure you can push down all the way.

Has your keyboard calcified into stone? No, it has not.

But can you really do it? Push through any built-up problems? Return to write something good again? Yes, you can.

You can write even if you’re rusty–or blocked. I’ve done it. My students have done it. My writing friends have done it. Pulitzer Prize winning writers have done it. And you can do it too.

Writers, unlike musicians or dancers, don’t need to literally recondition their muscles for weeks and months to get their technique back. For us, it just takes a little time, and a little attention, to work out the kinks and clear the gunk. Sometimes it just takes a few minutes.

Over the next few weeks, I’m offering a series on the Writers’ Inlet newsletter on how to bust through rust and break through writer’s blocks.

By the end of this series, you’ll have a set of block-buster techniques that will help you clear just about any blockage that stands between you and your muse. Plus, I’ll post each step on www.writersinlet.com, so you can return to review each, and use these block-buster steps to get back to the page any time you feel hindered by a writing practice that’s been out of use.

These tips will help you whenever a blockage starts to build up—or, let’s face it, even after residue has built up over a while.

After you break those blocks I can’t guarantee you’ll go on to write a blockbuster, but you’ll be better able to tap back into the wellspring and reenter that good old flow the way you’ve done before, and will do again. My hope is that your writing will even become more purposeful and focused once you work your way through the steps.

So let’s get started.

Step one: Identify the problem.

When Tin Man needed a little help from Dorothy to get his joints moving after the forest rains did him in, the first thing Dorothy did was oil the rusty hinge of his jaw. Why? He mumbled a directive: Oil can. Mouth.

He needed to open his mouth articulate what was wrong, and what he needed to loosen up next.

Unlike the Tin Man, you don’t need Dorothy. You can do this for yourself.

Ask yourself, what’s got me stuck? Articulate it—or more than one “it.”

If you have a hard time identifying it, look closer. It’s right there, between your fingertips and the keyboard. Name it.

For many folks, it’s fear of failure, or judgement. In the form of self-doubt or jealousy or an attachment to certainly expectations.

Or it may be distraction—spring’s ants in your pants. The dish pile. The never-ending stories in your Netflix queue.

It might be a big life issue—a top fiver: stress of losing a job, loved one, a home (moving), a relationship, your health (or a loved one’s health issues).

Or other life pressures—the kids, the dog, the drip from the ceiling, the call from your long-lost aunt.

It could be the doldrums of the pandemic, or other inner angst that has nothing to do with writing itself. Old patterns like that lurk and murk of depression. That bugaboo of ADD.

You may be transitioning writing phases, from first draft to deep revision. From research, back to the page. And you’re having a hard time getting back into that pen-to-page flow you know and love. The wellspring seems to have dried up in the interim, and you’re anxious about getting it started again.

Or, let’s be honest. Maybe you just don’t feel like it.

Being honest—that’s a big part of this first step.

Now that you’ve identified the problem, what’s next?

Over the next few weeks we’ll discuss ways to ease back into writing when it resists. As Wallace Stevens once said, the best poems resist the intelligence, almost successfully.

The worst parts of your writing practice may try to resist your entreaties to return—almost successfully. But you won’t let those voices be successful. It’s all a matter of mindset.

Have you ever prepared to go swimming, and stood before the water, weighing your two options: ease in or just jump right in? The block-buster steps offer ways to ease. But you can skip all of them at any time.

You know what you really need to do. You go to the diving board, or the raft in the middle of the lake, or the rope swing tied to the tree along the river. You acknowledge the resistance to the chill of the water, then look at the flow of what’s before you, what you really want to be part of, the glinting possibilities undulating before you, and you jump right back in.