Getting writer’s block sucks, but the first step in un-clogging yourself is to figure out which kind of writer’s block you have.
There are three main types of writer’s block:
1) No ideas. You don’t know what to write in the FIRST PLACE.
2) No start. You have an idea but don’t know how to START.
3) No momentum. You’ve written part of it but don’t know how to CONTINUE.
Once you’ve identified your type of writer’s block, it’s time for the next step: fixing it.
For our latest stream, I wanted to induce something that most people try to avoid: writer’s block. After chat voted on a random sentence to start our writing exercise, I went with it and wrote half of a story, not knowing where I was going with it.
Then, just when I got to the point where I didn’t know what to write next, I stopped. That was my self-induced writer’s block. I couldn’t figure out what should happen next, and I could probably spend all day sitting there staring at the screen.
But instead of doing that, chat voted between three new random sentences, and the winning sentence immediately became the next sentence in our story. It was like taking a wrecking ball against a writer’s block wall, or de-clogging a writer’s block pipe… whichever metaphor you prefer.
Here’s the story I wrote, with the randomly-chosen first sentence and writer’s-block-destroying sentences in bold:
Last week on Tips-y Tuesday we talked about what to do when Word’s blinking cursor is making you sweat on a blank page. Today we’ll go to the next step: what to do when Word’s blinking cursor is making you sweat in the middle of a sentence.
