Breaking Writer's Block...

[azrael13]

How do you guys break your writer's block?

I pretty much have my entire story, "Sweet November", outlined but over the last couple months I have had a hard time finishing it. I wrote a large portion of it all at once in the late fall/early winter, but lately I don't have the will to write.
I do find myself thinking about the upcoming chapters on a regular basis, but I struggle to find the motivation to finish it as well as the perfect words.

What do you do when you feel like you have a good, well received story that you just can seem to finish?

Here's a link to my stories if you care to look before you comment.
http://www.literotica.com:81/stories/memberpage.php?uid=761668&page=submissions

 

[Guest]

I'm the worst one to give advice, probably, as my writing has been so sporadic lately.

But it sounds as if you should put this story aside and start on another one. After a couple of weeks of rest you may have more impetus to finish.

Just a thought.

 

[kendo1]

If you can't finish it - don't.

Write what you can write, what comes easily. It's not as if your writing is your occupation.
Fair enough for writers like Stephen King - sit down and write 5000 words every day.

For you, or us, it's a hobby. Enjoy it.

Eventually you can go back to it - but you'll probably want to edit what you have already done.

Another thought: change your medium. Sometimes it works. If you write on a computer, change to pen and paper.

 

[fcdc]

To unstick scenes or chapters, change viewpoint characters.

If Dick is the viewpoint character, write it from Jane's perspective. Sometimes you will find that Jane is the right person to tell the scene, and not Dick. Even if Jane is not the right person, Jane will notice different things than Dick, and she may unblock the scene for you.

Even if the story is told in first person, getting a different 'look' at your character helps immensely.

Barring that, go to a book you love. Pick a chapter. Use the first sentence from that chapter to start out your chapter, and then erase that first sentence. Often a different starting place will help you figure out the scene, too.

Two best hints I have.

 

[Bobmi357]

I had a similar problem in a story I was working on. I had reached a point in my timeline and discovered I had a huge hole in my plotfile, so I jumped ahead nearly a month in the timeline, writing from that point.

Eventually I was able to write enough that I could back fill the hole with relevant material.

Sometimes it also helps to be able to put the current wip on hold and jump to another storyline to help keep the brain thinking.

 

[TheeGoatPig]

I don't know. I'm blocked up as we speak, and I have something to write that I just can't think up.

 

[azrael13]

Thanks for all of the hints. All others are appreciated as well. Hopefully we'll see soon how your ideas worked out.

Thanks again!

 

[Lauren Hynde]

I'm no writer, but when I have my customary carpenter's block and suddenly stop being able to tell a chisel from a sash clamp and handling a turning gouge without poking someone's eye out seems next to impossible, I just step away from the piece I had been working on, set fire to the blueprints, and starve to death for a month or two.


I'll be damned. Dictionary says that one definition of carpentry can be "the way in which something, esp. a work of literature, is structured."

 

[CharleyH]

I'm no writer, but when I have my customary carpenter's block and suddenly stop being able to tell a chisel from a sash clamp and handling a turning gouge without poking someone's eye out seems next to impossible, I just step away from the piece I had been working on, set fire to the blueprints, and starve to death for a month or two.

LOL -

Azrael 13: I happen(ed) to be going through this today, but writer's block is never a term I like to use and simply because it implies that you have no ideas and don't have the capacity to think of any more and I am sure that you do. It's important to consider it more of a writers "pause" or "stall" and it's due to a lot of different things (lets not go there). The more important thing is kick starting it.

What I did a couple of years ago is started a tertiary story - one that doesn't matter much to me in the greater scheme of things and that I lay no great importance or conditions upon because I try to think of this story as going no where in particular. The story itself may seem pointless (although it is not pointless to me as a writer). Writing it helps me kick start my creativity. (You will see how I write it in a minute.) Each time I have writers stall, I name a chapter 1 through eternity( thankfully I have few chapters right now - lol).

It is about me and my life as a writer, a kind of pseudo-diary-aka-massive exaggeration, yet particularly focuses on my "writer's stall" moments. In some segments I walk myself through my own stall, or sometimes through different aspects of the writing process itself. Sometimes I focus on the things that are distracting me and other times I simply write whatever. I am heavy on hyphenated descriptions (in this sample) because for my own writing they make me think about descriptions or sometimes I just have a whole chapter of dialogue and other times I might just free fall write without any grammar. The important part is that each chapter (stall) represents a different aspect of my own process, of my own cynicism or depression in that moment to write and about the drive to keep writing and to "FINISH". The beauty is that at the end of it, I finish a chapter, which in turn gets me kick started because I have just accomplished something. Here is what I wrote today:

‘Why did you cut your hair?’

That’s what I remember my boss asking my girlfriend, Jennifer, at the company après-Christmas-party. It wasn’t the first time the question had irritated me.

Tabloid television and before-the-plagiarism-scandal newspapers like the New York Times once talked and wrote about Celine Dionne’s hair cut as if it was a National disaster, even though she’s Canadian. Even the Quebec lingerie company, La Senza refused to pay Eva Herzigova après-hair-cut because she suddenly didn’t look like the American dream anymore, despite that La Senza is a Canadian company and Herzigova isn't exactly American.

So who cares if Celine or Herzigova cut their hair? OK, Celine could have had something a bit more Sassoon-modern, but really – America didn’t sleep with either of them, and my boss with the bad-pick-up-lines didn’t get to fuck my then-girlfriend, either. Still, the question is a pivotal one, at least to this story.

"Why do you cut your hair so short?" My boss asked me the following year, when I was single and avant-fired.

What was I supposed to say? More importantly, what did he expect me to say? Maybe I should have ignored him that night, but he was such an asshole, and perhaps due to that extra Dean Martin-Martini I drank, I couldn't continue to hold back.

I leaned across the bar, brushing my ass stripper-like against his knee, and turned my body in a 45-degree-Horatio-Caine angle toward him, walked my fingers across his dick and in the most Marlene-Dietrich-smoky-cabaret whisper, I sung, "Ven arre you getting an enlarrgement?"

At first I suspected I would never hear 'that' question again, but a day after being fired, although they did call it corporate downsizing and sent me on my way with a taxi chit and four months severance with an intact dental plan and an extra $1673.94 hush money cheque, my grandmother asked me a similar question, "Are you a lesbian?"

I laughed at first because it was my gran, but I added a shouldn't-have-slept with-my-girlfrend's-boyfriend kind of regretful question, "Why would you ask that?"

"You have short hair," she bluntly answered.

Well, I admittedly paused for a moment because the short-hair issue seemed to be stalking me in a Mark David Chapman-way and then I shot off my answer, "So, do you, Gran."

EDIT TO ADD: after this - the pause is broken and the magic returns. Much luck to you as well!!