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RAAAGGGGEEE!
No seriously, I spit upon thee and hope you die in the depths of despair. You have ruined many an essay and are now haunting me in my writing endeavors. Die a painful and horrible death writers block.

I'm done. Anybody else?

I do not understand writers' block. How is it that one becomes unable to continue writing? If the program of the story is clear, and the personalities of all characters/events are grokked, then it should not be difficult to allow the story to write itself.

Perhaps if you are having difficulty, you should pause for a while to reflect upon your own goals in writing whatever you are stuck with. Perhaps you do not enjoy it? Perhaps the story is not following the path that you had initially prescribed?

A lack of love or being unable to immerse oneself in one's writing will likely hinder the otherwise productive writer. Do not force it - the story is there, you simply need to allow for it to be written on its own terms. And, if you discover as you continue that those terms are unsatisfactory, then:



So, applied to this context, if you feel that your story is valid, but it will not write itself, something within the story is not as it ought to be. Note also that in this context one may interpret "wrong" as meaning that one does not fully understand or has not fully created within their mind an element of the story. (I believe this quote was spoken by the Peter character in The Fountainhead, but I may be wrong. I have not perused that novel in a while.)


If you would like some specific aid in identifying what ails your creative processes, please post a thread with a more detailed explanation of your struggles in the Unstickifier sub-forum.

P.S. As I was editing my post, I noticed that "contradiction" and "contrabass" share the same Latin prefix. Amusing. Perhaps you may be able to find a method of capitalizing upon this.

@Shibu: it is unnecessary to quote one who has just posted. Everyone will understand to whom you speak without the quote.

I'm sure it happens to many, even some professional authors at one point or more, if not all.

I know I get it a lot, but in my case it's not so much writer's block as it is too many things that I want to write, and not sure which one to start on.

For example, I have a mock autobiography of a fictional celebrity who focuses a lot of attention in his autobiography to a strange friend, and there were people who were interested in reading that, but I haven't worked on it in so long...

Then there's the Hail Fledman series. I have a few stories written for that, but not all are up, and I have at least one or two more stories to write for it too before it's finished, but I also have a novel that I want to work on, another novel that I want to get to at some point, a lot of awsome and scary dreams that I've had that I want to write down, and a new series that I want to work on, along with other stories that have been bugging me and role play posts I've been daydreaming about for far too long to role plays that are practically dead...

...so yeah, for me, just too much to do...so I stopped writing for a bit, except for role plays, and decided to draw a picture...

I should be back to writing soon though.

Alexis, I share your plight - I am not one who enjoys editing work that I have already written, and so I strive to write everything perfectly on the first pass. Thus, I occasionally find writing difficult to begin.

My solution was to write on something else casually, without minding how well it was written. Once I was "warmed up" on that writing, I switched to what I actually wanted to write.

Alternatively, if I am working on my novel, I will use a similar, but slightly different approach. In my novel, I have a host of main characters, but one of them will not survive to a final draft - I will remove the character entirely. Thus, I am able to write about this character in a location and manner in which he or she does not influence the rest of the story as a way of "warming up", knowing that this character will not exist in the end.

If you find yourself able to live with the idea that the first draft need not be perfect, that is a solution, although I have found myself unable to accept this solution, so I only pose it for completion.