It’s the age-old stone wall on creativity that affects writers new and old: writer’s block. In this episode, we talk about the psychology of writer’s block, how we manage to escalate it from a little problem into a full on stoppage, and most importantly, how to move through it.

Don’t forget to download your free copy of 10 Questions to Break Through Writer’s Block.

Have a question or topic you’d like to have covered in the next season of the Story Coaching podcast. Send me a note in the comments or directly to CRMacFarlane@thewritable.com.

The Transcript:

Episode 12

Hello and welcome to Episode 12 of the story coaching podcast. So I’m super excited! Today is the last episode of this first season of the story coaching podcast. We are planning to come back and do another season. 

I would love if you dropped a note in the comments: what you’ve been liking, what hasn’t really worked for you, what questions you still have, if there are any topics that you want me to dig into next time around. I am starting to plan and starting to get things together for our next season. I would just absolutely love to hear from you, and how best this podcast can help you in your writing journey, wherever you are.

Alright, so this week is all about writer’s block, and when I say writer’s block, it might strike a chord of fear in you or frustration. I think almost all writers experience writer’s block and sometimes the newer we are–it’s not that the experienced writer experiences less writer’s block, but that they know how to handle it a little bit better. So new authors are often the ones that I see on the forums or in Facebook groups, or contacting me about being stuck.

They just feel stuck in the story and writer’s block, I would define it really, just as that feeling of being stuck. It’s a blockage in the creative energy, or sometimes just a significant slowdown. You don’t have to be at a standstill to be experiencing writer’s block. You just have to be moving much, much slower. Just to have so much trouble getting your inspiration flowing, getting your creativity flowing, getting words on the page. That is still writer’s block. Just if it’s not working the way that it used to, if it’s just not working the way that you want it to, or the way that it should for you. Writer’s block really is something that happens to all of us and with it can come all sorts of different difficult thoughts. 

We’ll talk in a minute about kind of two phases of writer’s block, but I really want to drive home the idea that writer’s block is not the result of a commitment problem. It’s not the result of lack of skill. It is something that happens to all of us. But writer’s block is also about the writer. We call it writer’s block. We don’t call it story block when we’re experiencing this creative slowdown or this creative stuckness.

It is something that is in the writer, and so there are two sources, or really kind of two steps that are two phases of writer’s block. A lot of people, a lot of what I see and hear people are blaming the story itself. I will hear things like is my story broken? Like it was going so well but now I see it’s really not that good a story. We tend to blame. We just point fingers at the story, we point fingers at the characters, we point fingers at the world, we point fingers at the conflict. We just say it’s not a good story. There’s not a whole story here.

And way back in Episode three, we talked about “is my idea any good” and hopefully you came away from that, knowing all stories. all ideas can be good stories if we know how to work with them, if we know how to turn them into a story. And when we’re halfway through, we’re experiencing writer’s block or we’re trying to blame the story. It’s not really the story. It’s that we don’t know enough about the story. 

When we don’t know enough about the story, it’s hard to know how to move forward. If we don’t know how a character would react in a certain situation, how are we supposed to write their reaction? If we don’t know how the pieces in the world are moving it’s hard to write the next phase of the story where things are happening in the world around our character. We can’t write that phase, we don’t know what it is that’s going to be happening.

So that’s really the first phase of writer’s block. That’s I think where it starts for many people. But we complicate this in our own minds. So we experience this feeling of, I don’t know where to go next in the story, and then it hits kind of a new level. It starts with, I don’t know where to go next and it gets built up into these false beliefs into these fearful beliefs.

People start saying, I can’t do this, I’m not cut out to be a writer, the story is too much, I’m never gonna figure it out, I have no talent, I’m not good enough. And maybe these aren’t things that you’ve said outright. It’s a lot easier to blame the story. But these are probably things that have crossed your mind, and that’s okay. That’s normal. That’s a human thing and it turns into, we basically get faced with this choice of, do we continue to blame the story? Or do we think about it being something with ourselves, and I believe what’s happening most of the time is that a person, a writer experiences this not knowing where to go forward with the story. They start to blame the story, but these doubts creep in and a lot of us, we don’t like feeling them, we don’t like thinking them so we kind of bury them, and we don’t focus on them. And then we really start to blame story, but writer’s block has already kicked in, if you’re at the point where you’re blaming the story. It’s already kicked in to the point where you are personally feeling insecure, and I want to reassure you, that that’s okay, that that’s normal. 

We’re going to talk about how to move through that, but I want you to recognize that if you’re blaming your story, if you’re thinking it’s time to move on to a different story. I mean, you can move on that’s just fine, but be aware that it’s these internal beliefs about ourselves. It’s when we start to believe that we can’t do it. That is what holds many writers in writer’s block. So how do we move through it? How do we get past writer’s block?

Again, I really want to assure you that everyone experiences writer’s block okay? It’s normal, it’s totally okay. It’s not something insurmountable. It’s not a sign of weakness, or inability. If you are having those feelings of, I’m not good enough, I don’t know how to do this, I don’t know how to work with this story, I don’t know where to go next. It’s okay to have those experiences.

Again, it really is going to start pretty simply, it’s going to start with just not knowing how to move forward, recognize that, hey, I was writing, I was moving along just great and I came to this point where I didn’t know, where it wasn’t obvious what the next step of the story was and I didn’t really know how to deal with that. And so I stopped.

But then instead of just handling the not knowing where to go next, we started to let it mean something more. We started to let it mean something more, in terms of our ability, in terms of who we are and whether or not we are writers. right? 

Instead of just saying, Hey, the next step of the story isn’t obvious. We say, I don’t know what the next step of the story is and it turns into this emphasis on and the most important thing when we’re trying to move through writer’s block is to recognize that and to release that feeling of I.

Because every writer experiences this, I guarantee you. I experienced this like all the time and I can almost guarantee you that all the big names, even the most prolific guys out there, they experience this. They experience a moment where they don’t know where the story is gonna go next. Where they don’t really know what to do next.

But the difference really becomes in how they handle it. I think what I have come to do and what I would expect the prolific writers have come to do is, when I hit a point where I don’t know where to go next in my story, I know that I just have something more than I need to learn. I need to know something about the character, I need to know something about the world and I just sort of take a step back, and I start learning more about the story.

This goes back to that story planning process, which isn’t just a process that you do before you start writing, but you can do it in the middle of your story. You can do it at any point to learn more about the story. That story planning process is just asking how, why, what does that mean? The character is stuck, or the story is stuck. The character is here and we need to really figure out what is this character’s reaction going to be?

We start asking a series of questions to ourselves and those questions are directed by the other things that we know about the character. We start asking those questions, until we find the next best step, until we start to see a picture of how this character would react. We find the next best step and we take that.

It really is when you hit that story stuckness, that very first phase of writer’s block, it really is as simple as being able to stop, step out of the story and look at it from a broad overview, story planning, lots of question asking process.

This can be tricky. It’s gonna be tricky to do mentally, especially if you’re someone who works to a deadline or a word count goal every day because it’s going to slow down your progress. You are not going to put as many words on the page if you are spending your time thinking about what’s going to happen next.

But know that it is time well spent, it is time that is going to make your writing so much stronger and it is time that if you spend it now in order to avoid possibly in the future, being stuck in this deeper level of a writer’s block. You don’t want to be stuck there, you don’t want to be stuck there for months, so take a few minutes to just go through some questions, to try, to figure out more, learn more about your story, and be okay with maybe not hitting the deadline or the word count goal for the day. Because of course, you’re actually doing much more important work. It just doesn’t show up in that one metric that we measure. If you’re someone that goes by metrics, and measure by metrics, and is measuring their progress on a daily basis to keep yourself motivated on a daily basis.

Now, if you are someone who actually is in that deep, deep level of writer’s block, the process is very similar but the step that you need to do first is you need to accept where you are. This can be a tricky thing to do. This is a tricky thing to do. There’s no question about it. I have been in this deeper level of writer’s block myself many times and recognize again that it’s okay, that it’s normal if you have gotten to the point where you don’t know where to go in your story, but now it started to affect how do you think about writing? How do you think about yourself? How do you think about your story and started to think about it, started to mean more to you than just, Hey, I don’t know what happens next.

Know that that’s somewhere that a lot of people will go. That somewhere that our thoughts will take us pretty naturally and they’re going to encourage us to step away, to put the story away forever, to not do the scary thing. What’s really important and the best way through this honestly, it’s just to recognize it. Maybe just listening to this podcast, maybe just being reminded that this is a process that happens. It happens in our brains and we just need to be aware of it.

Now, when we’re here, again, it really is about releasing the personal attachment. It’s about releasing the meaning to it, and it’s about a little bit of fortitude and saying, Hey, I’ve gotten to the point where maybe I don’t feel good about writing, maybe I don’t feel good about the story, maybe I’m afraid to keep writing or I’m afraid to keep working on the story. And it’s gonna take a little bit of fortitude to push those thoughts aside, to recognize that they’re just thoughts and you can choose something different and to start looking at the story. Going through that question-asking process until you find the next best step.

That’s the only extra thing that we need to do when we hit this deeper level of writer’s block. When it does expand into something bigger, we just need to be able to recognize what’s happened. Recognize what’s happened, decide that we’re going to move through it, decide that we’re going to move through it easily. Start asking your questions, and start following the next best story step.

You really do want to be prepared for slow progress, you want to be prepared for a little bit of trepidation as you go back into a story, especially if you’ve hit this deeper level, but know that the more you keep going back to it, the easier it’s going to get and the more that you can ask questions, the more that you can go through these mini story planning processes.

I’ll let you know, I probably revisit my story planning documents, meaning my characters, my world, my conflict, my deep understanding of all of these things and how they mesh together. I’ll probably go back to that, five or six times while I’m writing a first draft. I’m definitely going to go back to it between the first and second draft because I’ll have learned so much more and there will be new questions that come up as I’m writing.

It’s very natural to hit a point in a story where you get stuck, where you don’t know what the next step is, because there’s just something that you don’t know. That’s all it is. There’s just something about the story that you don’t know, and that’s what led to your writer’s block. It’s a very human thing to let it mean more than that, but it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t really mean anything more than that. It only means as much as you decide to let it, right. 

We’ve talked through all of this, and we get to be the one that decides, Hey, when I experience writer’s block, when I don’t know what the next step of the story is, what am I– How am I going to show up? How am I going to address that? Or maybe you are listening to this episode, maybe you googled, and you’re here because you are stuck in a serious writer’s block. Know that you have the ability to decide in this moment, how you’re going to show up. And are you going to show up in fear? Are you going to show up in these beliefs that, I don’t know what to do with the story, I’m not good enough, I’m not cut out to be a writer? Or are you going to say, Hey, those are just thoughts and I don’t need to listen to them. I don’t need to follow them. I don’t need to go with them. I don’t need to make this mean anything more than it does. All that it means is that there’s something about the story I don’t know. 

That is the whole secret to getting through writer’s block. I know writer’s block is a huge problem. I see it come up and I see it come up. Maybe people do call it writer’s block. Maybe they just call it something else, but I see it come up over and over and over again.

That’s why kind of an oldie but a goodie for you guys today. If you want a free download, a free guide to help you move through writer’s block wherever you are in your story, I’ve got 10 questions to help you break through that writer’s block and that’s as usual, that’s available at theWritable.com/writers-block. 

You can also check out all of the free resources, theWritable.com/free-resources including that story planning guide that goes through all the questions and how to ask questions and how to get to a deeper understanding of your character, your world and your conflict. That’s all available there, and that’s all available for you to really try to help you move through it and like I said, I’m in the writer’s block. This writer’s block download I’ve had it available for it was the first one I put together and it really does have some powerful stuff in there to help you move through writer’s block whatever level you are at. 

So I would encourage you if you are feeling stuck, go ahead and download that. Have a look through. Have a work through of your story and you will start to see some new shining pieces and be able to identify that next step. All any of us can do, whether it’s in life or in writing. All any of us can do is take the next best step.

So thank you again for joining me for this episode and for this season of the story coaching podcast. I will see you next season which is scheduled to start coming out again in I think April. Alright, so thank you so much everybody.

Like I said, please send your comments and questions and what you’d like to hear next to CRMacFarlane@thewritable. All of this is in the comments because I know it can be hard to pick up all of the email addresses and htmls but thank you so much again and I will see you next season!