Writer’s Block? I got you

Sunday, I managed to write more than 5,000 words, and I wanted to stay up and write more, but unfortunately, I’m an adult and had to work the next day. Also unfortunately, that creative flow I had on Sunday fizzled out and all that was left was about ten words of not a lot of anything. 

Tuesday came around, and still, I couldn’t really get past 500 words or so. Yes, 500 words is successful. Only writing one word is successful as well. Until it isn’t. Until writing one word a day means that it’ll take 50,000 days to write the number of words NaNoWriMo challenges you to write in 30 days. 

This lack of creativity, of being able to move on with a story is what we writers call writer’s block. I’ve had it often in my career, both as a military journalist and as an author. Quite frankly, it sucks, and I don’t know any writer who loves getting writer’s block when it happens.

There are so many resources to help us move past it, but when you’re stuck in that moment and still need or want to get words on the page, sometimes it feels like you just can’t.

So, what do you do? Earlier in my career as a writer, I would just stop writing, and I feel that’s common with any creative person. When that muse is gone, we stop. We lose interest. For me, it was the process I had built that made it difficult to move on in the story.

As a pantser, someone who writes stream of consciousness in hopes that by the end the plot makes enough sense to go back and fully develop the story, if I got writer’s block I couldn’t really move on and come back later.

Now, because I visualize my story beforehand and work to flush out the plot before I put the proverbial pen to paper, I’m able to put in a place holder and move to the next chapter.

I did that last night when I got to a point in the story I hadn’t fully planned, so I put a place holder in parenthesis and started the next chapter. I’ll go back and fix it later, once my first draft is done, and that’s ok. 

It’s ok to get stuck. It’s ok to put a placeholder there and move on. It’s ok to never really know exactly where you’re going. All that matters is that you wrote. That you put words to the page, even if it’s that one word.