I cracked the code for curing my writer's block.

Hopefully now I can write 27,385 words in seven days.

Sometimes when I sit down to write, I get a heavy “ugh” feeling at the prospect of getting words on the page. I stare at my computer screen watching the cursor blink expectantly but nothing comes. All of a sudden I realize how urgently I must wash the dishes or take out the trash and no writing happens.

There’s a number of reasons why this occurs. I’ve written previously about causes and solutions for writer’s block:

How I Get Myself to Sit Down and Write

But last week, none of my previous solutions for getting words on the page were working. I floundered for a while, busying myself with everything that was not writing.

Eventually, I figured out why I couldn’t make progress on my novel and how to get the ball rolling again.

Here are the two reasons my writing was blocked last week and how I dealt with them.

I can’t write the story if I don’t know what is going to happen next.

I didn’t realize this until last week, but scenes of what the characters were doing and saying in my novel had lived in my head for weeks, maybe months, before I actually wrote them down.

When I had been laying in bed trying to sleep, or driving my kid to school, or folding laundry, I’d been subconsciously forming images and composing dialogue. So when I sat down to write, I just described the movie that was already playing in my head.

But last week, when I got to a certain juncture of my book, I peered into my mind and had no images to describe. I simply had not imagined them yet. Try as I might to will the words to appear on my computer screen, I couldn’t get my hands to type without my brain directing the film.

So, I pulled up my scene list spreadsheet and let myself stare off into space and just think. No typing, just thinking. Who says what? What do they look like? How do they feel? What is the setting?

I must have sat and stared for over three hours. At some point I got up and started pacing around my house. I walked in circles and just let my brain populate the story in my head. Taking the pressure away to produce words, and just spending time in imagination-land was the key.

After hours of doing nothing but live in my head, I finally had grist for the mill.

If I try to write scenes during a brainstorm, the “ugh” feeling returns.

I made the critical realization that it’s a bad idea to put guardrails on my brain during a phase when it wants to bounce around and produce ideas faster than my conscious mind can make sense of them enough to write coherent scenes.

During a brainstorm, my mind will compose dialogue for a scene at the end of the book, then jump to imagining the setting of a scene midway through the book. Next I’ll find myself reliving a scene I already wrote and thinking I need to add a particular detail. In that moment, there’s no way I can write the next numbered chapter of the manuscript, as planned. Not when my head is writing three scenes at the same time in different parts of the book.

They say with boxing, missing the target requires more energy than landing the blow. When you miss or pull the punch, all the energy has to be absorbed by your own body, and you have to work harder to slow down and stop the motion of your arm.

That’s how I feel about holding my brain back. It’s like pulling on a horse’s reins. Slowing down my brain to type coherent sentences takes energy from everyone—the rider, the horse, the reins. But a horse running free over a flat meadow is maximizing all the energy available.

Last week I discovered that trying to ideate and craft orderly scenes at the same time wasn’t working. So I just let my mind run amok. I did write—but not in the manuscript. Instead, I put stream-of-conscious-style notes, phrases, and bulleted lists in Obsidian (my digital note-taking app). And that was very fruitful.

Between September 11 and yesterday, I generated over 8,700 words in ideas for scenes, dialogues, backstory, setting, and character motivation. Those words are a jumbled mess and don’t belong in the manuscript. But when I do go to write those scenes in the book draft, I know the words will flow out now.

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I have to write 27,385 words in one week.

The 100k goal is coming along. I’ve added 15,460 words to the manuscript since September 3 (just two weeks ago).

Now I have one week to write 27,385 words. Phew. Will I make it? That’s almost double the pace of the last two weeks.

It might seem like I didn’t make much progress last week (September 8-14) but that would be wrong. The numbers don’t tell the whole story.

The 8K+ words I wrote in Obsidian aren’t included in my manuscript word count table below. And I believe that all those brainstorming notes will make the manuscript words come much faster as I push through to September 24.

Questions for you all:

1. Have you experienced writer’s block?

2. What’s a writer’s block solution that has worked for you?

Write on,

Noor