Category: experience

            I know that’s hard to believe—that giving criticism can be the hard part.  I mean, just check out any social media site.  Over the past week or so there’ve been tons of people offering critiques of… y’know, different stories.  Often for free. Usually unasked for.

            This should bring us to the second point about giving criticism.  It should be constructive, not destructive.  The goal isn’t to rip something apart, it’s to explain why and how it can be better.  Yes, sometimes this might mean a couple blunt, harsh truths will need to come out.  But even these don’t need to be designed to make the writer cry for weeks.  If that’s why I offered to critique someone’s work, well… I’m doing this for all the wrong reasons.

            Being able to offer a good critical analysis means being able to juggle a lot of hats.  I need some actual knowledge and understanding of different structure forms and grammar.  I need to have read more than two or three “how to write a bestseller” books.  It wouldn’t hurt if I’ve sat and thought about this knowledge and absorbed it a bit.

            And just book-learning isn’t going to cut it.  I also need a lot of practical experience.  Lots and lots of reading.  Not just the classics. Not just the NYT bestsellers.  Not just the “good” stuff.  I need a broad-yet-solid background in the subject matter—no one should be asking me to read their hospital-based romance, and if they do I should be clear up front this isn’t quite my area of expertise.

            Oneis that it doesn’t need to be stiff. Unless I’ve been hired as a professional, I’m reading/critiquing for somebody I know.  Possibly someone I even consider a friend.  I can have fun with this.  It can be conversational.  It can be funny/snarky/flirty whatever.  I don’t need to change my relationship with someone to offer them criticism.  They want it from me, not from Professor Huffy von Formalnotes.

            This, my friends-students-lurkers-haters-et al, is the 400th post here on the ranty blog.  Yep.  Four.  Hundred.  I know that doesn’t really mean much, in the big scheme of things.  There are some folks who post way, way more frequently than I ever will.

            Hell, forget guru, I’m not much of a writing teacher.  I’m barely a writing adviser.  Most of the Coffeehouse folks can vouch for this.  At best, I’m kind of the old writing hermit up in the hills.  You can ask me questions and I’ll shake my fist and shout some kind of answer, but I’d guess at least half the time my answer won’t work for you.  Probably closer to 2/3 of the time.

           Now, on a basic level, the doctor has taken care of the patient’s problem.  And it’s kind of a win-win for the doctor.  If the man keeps doing it and the pain persists, he’s going against the doctor’s orders and the doc was right telling him to stop.  If he doesn’t do it and there’s no pain, then the doctor was right telling him to stop.

            The catch here, of course, is that the doctor hasn’t actually done anything.  And that’s how a lot of gurus operate.  They know how tough it can be to succeed in this business, so they charge a lot of money and offer foolproof advice.  Foolproof in the sense of it can’t fail, because the advice is not to do anything.

            There’s another way I’m different from a guru.  I have actual, recent experience.  Not references or testimonials—experience.  I honestly can’t tell you the number of self-proclaimed experts I’ve seen who haven’t had a single sale in their chosen industry in years.  Assuming they’ve ever even had a sale.  One of my favorites was a “script doctor” I’d never, ever heard of (keeping in mind, I worked in the film industry for fifteen years and then reported on it for another five) who assured would-be clients that he’d worked on lots and lots of big box office films… none of which he was allowed to name for confidentiality reasons. 

This week, I wanted to talk a bit about a familiar malady we’ve all heard of—writer’s block.

It happens to all of us. Y’know, four out of five writers experience writer’s block at some point in their career.  Almost 83% on average end up…

Okay, that’s not true.

None of it.

I’ve got to be honest. I fall into the same camp as Isaac Asimov and Piers Anthony.  I just don’t believe in writer’s block.  Sorry.

Now, let me be clear.  Yeah, there are days that I hate writing.  Of course there are.  This is a full time job for me, and guess what—like everyone else on Earth, there are days I hate my job.

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s a fantastic job, it’s the job I’ve wanted pretty much my whole life (aside from brief dabblings with “astronaut” and “giant robot pilot”)… but there are days it frustrates me. There are days I pull my hair out. There are days I still worry if I’m good enough, days I fret about my future, and days I wonder if I should’ve just sucked it up and found another job as a prop master.

But… I never have writer’s block.

There’s always something I want to write.  I never have a shortage of words or ideas.  I never stare at the screen and can’t come up with anything.

I think–and this is all just my opinion, so YMMV—that writer’s block is kind of a made up thing, like the muse.  It’s an easy excuse not to write.  When I see people online talking about being blocked for months or years… I have to be honest, I just don’t buy it.

I think writer’s block tends to boil down to three very real, very relatable things…

First is a voice issue.  Or maybe an empathy issue.  Kinda the same thing, for our purposes here.

Let me explain.

A few weeks ago at the Writers Coffeehouse, we talked a bit about voice.  I think—especially when we start out—a lot of us tend to write the way we speak.  Maybe a little cleaner or clearer, but it’s not that odd for writing patterns to match up with speech patterns.  Our narrative voice uses all the same words and phrases and metaphors that we do in our day to day life, because that comes naturally.  Makes sense, right?

Thing is, when we go to write… things stop matching up.  If we’re any good at this writing thing, we recognize that high elf ladies probably don’t talk like office drones from Dallas or check out clerks from Portland.  They’re going to have different vocabularies and cadences.  They’re not going to sound like me.

Suddenly I’m not writing “naturally” anymore.  This takes effort!  It’s work.  It means I need to put myself in a different headspace and look at the world—even my fictional world—in different ways.

I think this particular form of writer’s block eliminates a lot of folks from the pool, one way or another. Either they keep going, writing dozens of different characters that all sound pretty much the same… or they give up because they can’t make them sound different.  And those folks will talk about being blocked. How they couldn’t get the ideas to flow or the characters didn’t want to come out or something like that…

The second thing behind writer’s block is fear.  Plain old-fashioned fear.

I’ve talked about this before.  I think a lot of times when people say they can’t write, it’s more that they’re worried the stuff they are writing isn’t good enough.  Is this page, this paragraph, this sentence as good as it could be?  Have I used the best words?  The best description?  Is this the best way to phrase this?  Will this win me a Pulitzer or get me mocked on GoodReads?

I think most of us go through this phase at one point or another.  We start over-analyzing our work and second-guessing everything we put down.  I’ve mentioned the term paralysis by analysis before, which I think sums this up perfectly.  We get so scared at the thought of doing something wrong—something that isn’t perfect—that we don’t do anything.  We freeze up.  We get… blocked.

But we already know the solution to this one, too.  It’s just admitting that my work isn’t going to be perfect the first time out.  Perhaps not the second, either. It’s going to need editing.  Second and third and fourth drafts.  Maybe even full rewrites.  That’s just the way writing goes. And once I realize this—once I can really admit it to myself—I can get past that fear and my productivity will go through the roof.

And this brings us to the third thing behind writer’s block. And this is the tough one. The hardest one to deal with.

Sometimes people have writer’s block because they don’t have anything to write.

There’s a lot of reasons people sit down and try to write.  Sometimes they think it’s easy.  Often they have a clever idea, but no real story.  Maybe they want the adoration for a finished work more than they want to… well, finish something.

This sounds harsh, I know, but I think most of us know someone like this.  Someone who isn’t suffering from writers block, they just like the idea of being a writer more than the reality of being a writer.  Because the reality is that this isn’t easy—it’s a lot of work.  Some people just aren’t cut out for it.

And look, if that’s you… this is a good thing.  Personally, if this isn’t what I’m made for, I’d rather know sooner than later.  Maybe I love writing as a recreational thing, but I’m just not geared to do it professionally.  That’s how I am with cooking.  And drawing.  And cosplay.  And running.  I like it, I have some rough talent for it, but I freely admit I’m not mentally wired to do it as more than a pastime.  If I hit a rough patch… well, I just shift to something else.

Like some folks do with writing.

Y’see, Timmy, if you ask me, writer’s block is really just a big, catch-all name we throw over other problems.  Inexperience.  Fear.  Lack of interest. It’s intimidating when it’s a vague concept, but once we break it down into an actual issue, we can address it and deal with it.

And beat it.

Next time, I’d like to talk about the type of story I’m working on.

Until then… go write.

            First is that, once I hit a certain stage in my writing, I start to see certain things.  I can admit to flaws in my work.  Of course, once I admit problems might be there, that also opens me up to imagining and creating problems. 

            Until then, go write.