Ann Aguirre is the author of Grimspace and its upcoming sequel, Wanderlust.

When Dee [Bam: That would be me] emailed me and asked me to write a blog about writer’s block, I had to say:

“I don’t get writer’s block. I suffer from lazy sometimes, and I’d rather play video games, watch TV or take a nap than do my work. Do you want me to write about that?”

She said yes.

So here we go. First, it should be noted that my opinions and processes apply to me. If you get something of value from this post, awesome. If not, well, you probably weren’t gonna work for the minute and a half it took you to read this anyway, so you found a new way to screw off on the internet. Sweet!

As I see it, there are two schools of thought on writing. In one school, we have people who have a muse. If the muse dries up, they can’t write. They may wander around in a fugue state, waiting for this to clear up via an act of God. In the other school, we have people who write no matter what. If a muse is present, that’s wicked good; if not, the book still needs to be written.

I fall into the latter category. Some days, the words come hard, and I spend all day getting to my goal word count. I struggle over it. I sweat and I cuss, and I think this is the stupidest idea ever, and my characters have no more personality than an empty knapsack. I’m sure the whole story arc sucks, I suck, and I really should be selling Tupperware instead.

Some days, it’s magical and I bang out a chapter in less than three hours. Some days, I’m in the zone, and the words pouring out of me feel so visceral that I weep as I type, a la Kathleen Turner in ROMANCING THE STONE. Go on, laugh at me (but you know you’ve done it too).

Either way, I don’t quit work for the day until my words are done. Why? Because otherwise I’ll never finish my projects. Sticking with something takes willpower, and sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes I’d rather slack off and watch TV or read someone else’s books. That would be easy. I don’t want that, though. I want this job too much to be lazy about it; I ignore the “id”. Only after I’ve met my daily word count do I reward myself with something purely for fun.

Yeah, writing is fun, but it’s a different sort of fun. Writing is also work. Anyone who says otherwise is full of crap. It takes dedication to keep your ass in the chair when there’s so little immediate gratification. We wait years for feedback. We get told we stink repeatedly until we have to grow elephant skin in order to keep trying at all. This is one of the only jobs where you could spend twenty years hearing how terrible you are — and then overnight, all that can change. One editor likes you, and suddenly readers get a look at your stuff. Surprise! They love it. So does that mean you didn’t suck after all or you spent twenty years learning NOT to suck? It’s a question for the ages. I suspect it’s also why some authors seem to go batshit. This is not a world with absolutes; the subjectivity can be crazy-making.

The suggestion I have for people who suffer from writer’s block? Write anyway. Try a new project. Write something just for fun. Ask a colleague to collaborate with you. Just don’t give up. The longer you go without creating, the rustier your mental muscles get. When I go into promo mode after completing a project, I notice it takes me a lot longer to hit my stride when I go back to writing a first draft again. I fight to reach my daily word count; the story doesn’t flow. Why? Because I’m out of practice. And you don’t get practice by blogging about writing, IMing about it, or by bitching about your block.

To help with that, give yourself permission to suck. Yeah, I really wrote that. It took me forever to learn that I wasn’t going to create perfection in the first go. I thought revision was for “bad” writers, people who couldn’t get it right the first time. Shows what I knew. I used to labor over each word, stress about sentence structures as I was writing it. I wanted everything to be just so, each word a diamond perfectly placed. That was a recipe for disaster. Going that route, I would have had the best chapter in the history of first chapters —and nothing else, ever.

Now I don’t much care how well I do the first draft. I don’t care if I use the word “trouble” five times in one chapter or if all my characters do nothing but nod and sigh throughout the book. I keep moving forward. Even if I write something I think is terrible, it’s shaping the book. I tell myself, “I can fix it!” That’s my mantra. Sometimes I make notes about how I want a scene to turn out in the final draft instead of the placeholder-style crapulence I actually produced. Remember, nothing is set in stone. In this computer age, it’s super easy to rewrite and move stuff around.

So that’s my advice. Write the book. Finish. Don’t stop to reread. Don’t tinker along the way. Don’t worry about it being perfect in the first go. That’s not the point. The point is to finish. You can’t edit a blank page.

I think of it as building a house, in fact. First you assemble the frame, dialog and basic action. On your first pass through, you look for continuity, correct egregious errors, and spackle gaping plotholes. On your second pass, you add detail and elegance, description if you’re so inclined. Then you have a beta reader take a look and incorporate any smart suggestions. Repeat as desired if you have an agent or editor. In such a way, you’ll cruise through your book several times, making it shinier in each go.

Does it matter that your first version was a POS? Not so much, if you had a good core idea. So that’s my advice regarding writer’s block.

Forget about it and write. Just write something, anything, until you remember why you wanted to write in the first place.

[Bam: I’m Dionne Galace and I endorse this blog post.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 2:56 am and is filed under Guest Author. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.