Writing Advice Class

Want to know a good way to stay inspired as a writer when you are struggling with some sort of block? Here is the best advice I can give you, and it's the same that I, at times, constantly still have to remind myself with: Start a new story. Or, if not that,  start a new style of writing. You'll be surprised how much it helps you. Not just to find new ideas that you might play with for an hour or two -- but also to do something else that is, sometimes, even more important, for an aspiring scribbler: It will help you stay posted in front of the keyboard, and this is the biggest key of all.

Put simply, one thing I wish someone had told me years ago, when i first started writing, was that, when one is writing a long work, like a novel, one will often experience major blocks because, well, as a novel goes on and on, there are many different directions you can take the story in, and what winds up happening is that, as it gets longer and longer, the text also gets more and more precious (since you are investing further time in it, etc) and so, in my experience, novels often tend to sort of come to a halt at times, where you eventually want to step away from the keyboard after a scene, and really give the next scene thought. You do this because now you don't want to accidentally ruin a text that is good, and trust me, sometimes, in my experience, if you go too fast and push too hard, you will accidentally destroy a good text. Hence you start to get weary of your own manuscript and you force yourself to really think through each scene. Thinking isn't a bad thing but of course time spent thinking is often not spent at the keyboard, and so what happens is you drift off into this place where you might feel "blocked", since you will notice your word count lessen.

 In my opinion, however, it isn't a legitimate writers block one is feeling here. It's really just a block for that one specific story. I did not totally grip this years ago,of course, and so what would happen is I would often start to feel so disappointed in myself for losing track of one tale after, say, a month of ferocious work on it, that I would feel like a "loser" and a bad writer -- and what would happen next but that I would actually then maybe not write for a few months (1) and devote myself to something totally different. This , of course, no longer happens to me. Because I eventually came to understand the manner in which I think many novels are actually written 'behind the scenes' ,and what I firmly believe is that a great many of them are added to here and there. I really believe this, especially because I have followed a number of interviews with best selling authors - or just read their memoirs - and it seems to me that they use the same method I was using even when I was younger....but the difference was that I did not realize what I was doing, and they did. I.e. I thought I was a failure for running out of steam after a month and slipping a half finished work into a drawer, and they just slipped it into the drawer and started a new work, and then when that new work was half finished, they went back to the old one! Get it?

I believe it was Jim Morrison who once said that "art is never really finished; it is only abandoned". Well, no where does this theory of Morrison's apply more than when it comes to novel writing, methinks, because novel writing is so clearly the world of beginnings and endings, and so many times we writers , I think, tend to forget to think like readers, instead. And the real truth about readers is that - as demanding as they can be - they oftentimes take what they are given and do not really say much ,in my honest opinion. Truth be told, most readers do not analyze texts nearly as much as certain places on the Internet would have you think they do, which is to say that, oftentimes, even if a novel has a rather cruddy ending, or maybe even if it has a completely implausible beginning that makes next to no sense (and which I, as a writer, woul endlessly stress over) readers tend to just take it for what it is.

They, as a rule, tend to never really dwell on anything nearly as much as the author does. This should come as obvious but often does not. I, for one, on the occasion that I have jumped into some authors texts trying to see with an "authors eye" instead of a readers eye...have often been surprised at what I have felt I probably would have deleted in my own stories. Writers are always reading and re-reading their own manuscript. So you naturally tend to really dwell on each and every line.

And I think a lot of this leads to authors getting blocked because, believe it or not, but sometimes you might even already have written the ending to your story...without even realizing it. The reason you do not want to accept it as the ending, of course, is because, in the first place, you weren't warned that it was coming (since you don't see the pages of the paperback running out) and , in the second place, you know, as a writer, that you could still go on, if only you wanted. The reader of course doesn't know this. They see the end and that is it, it is the end. They don't sit and say "what is this guy doing? He should have written 20,000 more words at least." No. They just take it for what it is -- and then guess what many of them probably do?

They throw the book down on the floor - that's right! - and then they pick up another one and get started with a whole new story right away. And there of course is that other little thing readers do that, like I'm saying, writers ought to do too: Throw the manuscript you've been working on for the past 3 months on the floor, and start another one, just like you would start another book. Don't take it so seriously. Look at it just like you probably look at all those books scattered all around your residence. Allow yourself to escape it and start something new.  You certainly have done this before with your reading right? You've picked up a story at the store...read the first two pages..you put it down..you start another... then another. Take that approach with writing - at least sometimes -- and you might not believe what you find.