Try This

What you write is what reveals you best.

-Arab proverb-

Books have been written about blocked artists, most notably for me, Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. But as I have already said, deep down, I do not believe in block per se. I believe that block is an excuse, and a stupendous one at that, which continuously manages to throw spanners into the flux of our work. We all encounter so-and-so days and good days and write-off days and excellent days but our ability to power through all of them regardless is what sees us at the other end of the creative process. Today's exercise is about difficult times, when you've written and re-written and, eventually, your half-abandoned project is lingering in the sidelines while you kick yourself for being inapt, or blocked or unfocused or whatever you like to call yourself when you get despondent about your writing. Proceed as follows:

1. Get the piece of writing that has been the bane of your writing life and start by re-reading it;
2. Put it aside and write in your journal about your resistance. It doesn't matter what you write, so long as you make an effort to over-analyse it in great detail. Stay with it for 1,000 words or so;
3. Now go back to the piece you need to re-write and give yourself ten minutes only to tackle it. Then put it away and forget about it until the next session when you will repeat all of these three steps again. You will find that, once you've written about your difficulties in great detail, fixing the work will be infinitely easier than over-analysing your emotional response to it. Try it; it really works.

Comments

[Katarina]

Love this, thanks! I'm not a writer, but writing about the block always helps me, it helps to get the issues out in a very spontaneous way. When I just keep it in my mind, I nearly always get stuck.