Your Writing Method Often Holds You Back…

Sometimes Writer’s Block Is Basic Like Structure…

Spring of 1975.

I had just sold in the fall of 1974 my first two short stories (and I had also been selling a lot of poetry.) I felt that even though I had just sold two short stories back-to-back, I felt I needed to learn  how to write (a good instinct.) So I turned to writers who did not know how to write to teach me, but they seemed like they did. They talked a great game and their answers fit right into the common knowledge.

Oops… (Good instinct to keep learning, wrong execution.)

My method for writing the first two short stories on a typewriter were to do one draft as quick as I could, fix the typos with White-Out and mail the manuscript to an editor.  Never touch it again. Both sold.

But I “learned” that to do it right, I needed to write slowly, do a “rough” first draft, then rewrite the story again, and again. I needed to make sure every word was perfect and I had polished the manuscript. (Retyping manuscripts is sure fun.)

And I “learned” that the slower I wrote, the less I wrote, the better the story would be. (Yeah, I never thought that stupidity through. Who knew, if that worked I could have been a professional tennis player since I only played tennis twice a year in those years.)

So from 1975 through 1981 I wrote two “perfect” short stories per year, got form rejections, hated doing it, and had pretty much decided to quit writing by the fall of 1981.

I was a writer and totally blocked from what should have been my normal production and speed by the writing method I had learned from non-professional writers and teachers.

Now, granted my example is one of extreme stupidity. The moment I went back to doing it the way I had written those first two stories, I started selling again. And enjoying the writing again.

But I see writer after writer slowing themselves down by methods they were taught by who knows who or when. Often I see writers get some success with a method of writing and swear that is how they do it and that is how it is done, even though the method holds their production back.

Lots of things cause this blindness. Fear is the largest reason. It’s working, don’t break it, even though what is working is broken and not really working.

I have watched writers slowly drop into an inability to even write because of fear of changing.

There is no right way…

That is maybe the only true thing about writing. Every writer is different and every writer has a different method.

And publishing and writing stories are always changing. Year-to-year and decade-to-decade.

So the problem comes in when a writer’s method that maybe worked fine for the early years of their career is now holding them back in the middle years because of a fear of change.

Life changes also make it necessary to change writing methods at times. Just aging does that as I have been discovering.

So many factors. But that all said, each writer has a desired comfort speed and desired comfort production speed.

If something learned in the past is now holding back writing, making you feel like you should and wish you could do more, then you have a form of writer’s block. And fear of change will make this type of block difficult to fix.

From 1975 until the fall of 1981, I had writer’s block. Plain and simple. I wanted to write and sell more, but the system and methods I had learned along with a belief system stopped me cold. Not only did the method stop me from producing more, it caused me to turn out real garbage, polished and rewritten to death. No wonder I was not having fun. I wasn’t writing anything with me in it.

For decades as a professional writer, I claimed I had never suffered from Writer’s Block. That term has a definition so ingrained in the literary world that it lost any real meaning in the real world of professional fiction writing.

So for 18 weeks, Kris and I are going to tear that old definition out and try to help professional fiction writers spot what is stopping them or slowing them down.  Arm each writer with techniques and methods to solve the problem. Not only to help each writer this year, but for years and decades to come.

So yes, we will talk about learned structures as a block during the 18 weeks. And so, so much more.