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 the last stream’s exercise, we did an exercise about overcoming writer’s block.
There are many different types of writer’s block, though most people use it to mean “not knowing where to take the story next.”
It turns out the best way to beat writer’s block is to, well, write! It doesn’t matter if it’s good or if it makes sense, quite often just getting something down on the page will get the juices flowing.
To show that off, we induced writer’s block on ourselves. Chat came up with an opening sentence, then we wrote half a story, and stopped (that’s when we got “writer’s block”). To unclog the block, we got a random sentence that had to be the next sentence in our story, then we had to finish it to the end.
Here’s what we came up with:
For the latest stream we went back to one of our favorite writing exercises: randomly-generated sentences.
They’re a perfect way to work out your creativity muscles, and worst comes to worst, if your story sucks, hey, you can just blame the terrible random sentences!
Chat voted between three random sentences to start our story, and we wrote about half a page. Then we got another random sentence and had to use it as the next sentence in our story. Then we wrote another half a page and got a final random sentence, which would be our ending sentence that we had to write to.
Needless to say, it was pretty chaotic. But thanks to some awesome suggestions from chat, I absolutely love where our story ended up.
You can read it here: (the randomly-generated sentences are in bold)
Our last stream (with special guest Abbey) was on New Year’s Day, so we decided to ham it up as our theme and use it as our muse.
For our first writing exercise, we started off with a vote for the chat to pick which New Year’s topic we should write about (“a New Year’s Eve party” won), and we got a randomly-generated sentence to begin it with.
It was probably the hardest opening sentence we’ve had yet, but I’m happy with where it ended up. You can read what we wrote here: (the bold sentence is the randomly-generated sentence we had to start with)
Since our last stream was on Christmas, what better way to celebrate than by writing our own cheesy Hallmark Channel Christmas movie?
And of course, there’s an auto-generator for that!
Here’s what we got for our roll-your-eyes-but-you’ll-probably-watch-it-anyway Christmas movie plot: “The protagonist is an out-of-work actor who is forced to move back in with their parents. The love interest is a snowman magically brought to life. They work together to throw the demanding mayor’s massive holiday party (and fall in love in the process).”
Needless to say, this plot excited me. After getting some suggestions and votes from the chat, we were off. Here’s what we wrote:
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:
I recently read the short story “Cat Person” in the New Yorker that has been getting a lot of attention online. It’s rare for a short short to go viral; anything that’s not a Twitter post, YouTube video, or Facebook image usually has no chance, so it’s great to see an interest in the medium spark up.
Since the story is more or less about a really bad date/relationship, it inspired the theme for our recent writing stream: what’s the worst date you’ve ever been on?
We started off with a fun exercise: get a sentence from a random sentence generator (yes they exist and they’re awesome), and then write a story about a date starting with that random sentence. We wrote for 10 minutes or so, and then we got another random sentence, which would become our ending sentence, forcing us to somehow complete the story toward it.
It was tough, but thanks to some suggestions from the chat, I liked where we ended up. You can read the story below:
Good times were had during our latest writing stream. We started off with a fun exercise: we used a random word generator to get 10 random words, and then we wrote a story using them as the first word in each sentence. Because that’s how great writing gets done.
The words were: construct, announcement, arrange, suffer, ladder, constitution, audience, sweat, like.
I somehow ended up writing what seems like a speech made by a crazed dictator. Funny how… that happens? Read it here in all its glory:
