[SmokeAndMirrors]

How do I deal with writer's block?

Decide I'm a fake writer, cultivate ennui, scream, sob, throw things, get drunk and cry on my friends.

Seriously though, this is tough for me. When I get hit, I get hit hard and sometimes it's a long, seemingly endless drought. I had writer's block that lasted about 8 months once (albeit that was unusual, and it had a cause). Every time I tried to write something it set off another crying jag because it was just that horrible.

When I'm on, I'm seriously on. When I'm off, I'm seriously off.

The thing that's helped me more than anything is being forced to write on deadline. Even if my heart's not in it, it's gotta be there, and it's gotta be decent. It has to be. If it means I have to sit there and pound my head into the desk for 2 hours until I'm too numb to criticize myself anymore, that's what I have to do. Writing for survival - that helps.

I can't say I'm cured for life, but as I'm getting older it is getting easier to just force myself to write, and I'm getting developed enough that it's not just total trash even if I hate it and it's not my best work. It's always decent, at worst.

The real albatross of writer's block for me is the inner critic. Mine can be loud and rabid and mean. This is probably 90% of what gets me stuck in those sorts of holes. I sit there and all I can think is "You suck, you suck, you suck, you suck..." ad infinitum. That little blinking line on my blank page laughs at me.

Apart from deadlines, the other thing that helps sometimes is turning it into a work-out. This sounds weird, but bear with me.

An analogy I use a lot for good writing (or art in general, really) revolves around the idea of a "sound barrier." You'll always have a certain degree of an experience that is lost in the act of translation - there's a certain amount of "white noise" that is present when trying to render an experience into someone else's head. How this works, for me, is that I have to be over-experiencing something in my mind when I'm writing it, and the total effect is that it makes up for the "white noise" that is inherent to translation. You can shrink this gap the better you get at writing, but it will always be there.

When I have writers block, I have trouble breaking that sound barrier. Or rather, I have trouble focusing on the concept from under the onslaught of my inner critic, and I have so much "white noise" leaking into my writing that it just loses all of its punch, like a really crappy radio signal.

I have a giant white board.

I get up, go to my white board, and start graffiti'ing that shit like a crazy person. Random snippets of whatever comes to mind where ever feels right. Sometimes I sculpt the words into shapes - swirls, triangles, pieces colliding into each other. It's enormous, so I have to reach around a lot to get to the top, crouch to get to the bottom, physically move to get to the other side, and the whole process is physically engaging.

All this motion seems to take my mind off the inner critic. And it's visually involving as well as linguistically involving - maybe even more of the former. There's colors and randomness and whimsy. It's my grown-up finger painting.

It burns off a lot of the energy that's distracting me from focusing on writing and drops my "white noise" ratio by proxy.

This is much more useful for creative writing than it is for articles, and I think deadline writing has done more to hone me into a better writer over-all. But it's very cathartic, and I still do it once in a while.