There's no such thing as "writer's block"- Seth Godin explains

 

Seth Godin is a great speaker, entrepreneur, marketer, and has written over 20 books.  He's written more blog posts than I have (a mere 2,400 or so for me), he's well over 7,000 posts, according to Google.  Just type "Seth" into Google search, and it comes up.  Every day he writes a post, and I don't read near enough of them, I'll be honest.  In this clip from London Real, he explains where the idea of "writer's block" comes from, and why it doesn't really exist.  It's a 3 1/2 minute video, watch it.  

I haven't written very much about writing, and many of you reading this probably haven't seen my other blogs.  I came to realize that I'm a writer by first getting into the brand new sport of BMX freestyle in 1983-84.  I was a high school kid in Boise, Idaho, my family lived in a trailer park outside of town for a year, to save money to buy a house.  There were a bunch of teenage guys there, and only 3 or 4 teenage girls, so there wasn't much to do.  We started riding our BMX bikes every evening, as it cooled down, on some little jumps a motorcycle rider had made.  Over a few months, BMX became our thing.  

I raced for about a year, but found the new activity of trick riding, or "freestyle" side of BMX much more interesting.  The first flatland and ramp contest ever was held in the summer of 1984, in Venice Beach, California.  My friend Jay Bickel's parents put on the first BMX freestyle contest in Boise shortly after.  A year later my family moved to San Jose, California.  I knew there were a handful of pro freestylers, and several good amateurs, in the San Francisco Bay Area, so I started publishing a zine about freestyle to meet them.  It worked, and by the summer of 1986, my Xerox zine landed me a job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines.  I didn't think of myself as a writer, but I was beginning to have fun with writing.  Yet, at 20 years old, and with no college experience at all, I was proofreading two magazines. 

I only lasted a few months at the magazines, I just wasn't the right fit for that business.  I became the newsletter editor/photographer for the American Freestyle Association newsletter after that, and suddenly had 8 to 16 pages to fill every month.  I began to realize I was a writer, though I was still dreaming of becoming a pro freestyler.  That didn't happen, but writing zines, and self-publishing did stick.  I contributed to other magazines for a bit.  Much later in 2008, while out of work, I began blogging.  Like I mentioned above, after 12 years, I've written over 2,400 blog posts, across more than 25 blogs, and managed to draw around 440,000 total page views, (this post details those blogs).  I still haven't managed to write a "real" print book, but I wrote a 250+ page ebook about BMX, and self-published it last winter, selling a few dozen copies. Hopefully there's a real book in my future, or two, or twelve.

While I'm light years away from being a Seth Godin, or any other top writer you can name, I have spent thousands of hours putting pen to paper, and fingers to keyboards.  Here are a few of my own thoughts on writer's block.

One: If you can't find anything to write on the project you're doing, and you feel that you have writer's block, put that project aside.  Get an actual pen or pencil, and paper, and just start writing about all the things that piss you off.  Don't worry about grammar or spelling, this isn't to publish.  It's also not an "exercise."  Just vent, on paper.  Get it out, whatever "it" is that's bothering you.  When you come up for air, and take a break, 3 or 4 hours later, you'll feel better.  It's also very likely that you may have an idea or two for that project you couldn't find the words for earlier.  

Two: Get up, leave the pen and paper, computer, or whatever you write on.  Go take a walk.  Then try again.  Sounds lame, but it can really work sometimes.  Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way (and other books), is real big on this idea. 

Three:  Have 3 or 4 projects going at once.  Let's say you are focused on writing a novel.  Cool.  But maybe you do a blog as well, on a totally different subject.  Or do a blog, like this one, to help promote you and your writing.  Maybe you also want to write a few poems now and then, or short stories.  Have a file of those, either printed physical file, or on your phone or computer.  Maybe you also want to just have an "idea" list, where you jot down those random ideas, and a few sentences about each one, that you might do later, or that may be part of one of your current projects.  

Then, when you sit down to write the next part of your novel, and it's just not happening, try something else.  You may think you have "Writer's Block," or something.  You're just drawing a blank.  Jump to another project.  Write a goofy, funny poem about that weird guy who bugs you at work.  Or jot down a few ideas for something totally different.  Try a short story for a bit.  Or write a blog post about that funny thing your dog did yesterday.  Just write something.  No pressure, no drama, just have a little fun writing on another topic for a bit.  Then go back and see if the next bit of the novel is ready to get typed up, or jotted down. 

This is actually something I learned from BMX freestyle.  In my day, we'd go out and ride every night often flatland riding, other times at a ramp, or street riding.  Sometimes it would be just me in a parking lot.  Sometimes I'd ride with a few other guys.  We'd practice our older tricks over and over.  We'd also try to work out our new tricks.  It was usually the new tricks we'd get stuck on.  We'd get so focused, so determined, that all the fun drained out of it, and we'd psych ourselves out. Some nights that new trick just wouldn't happen.  So the go to move was to stop trying that new trick, and just go do a trick we could to every time.  Do a trick we had totally dialed, something we could do in our sleep.  That would usually got us out of the frustration and pissed off mode (the "blocked" part), then we'd try the new trick again.  Most times, we'd make progress. 

It's a head trick really.  Doing that changes your mental state, and that applies to writing or other creative work as well as doing tricks on a bike.  As creative people (freestyle, and other action sports are creative, as well), we put too much pressure on ourselves to do some things, the "important" pieces of writing.  We tie ourselves up in knots, and basically shut off the fun, the "play" aspect, and the flow of creativity.  So if you go off for a bit and to something "easy," something that "doesn't matter," the stress fades.  You open back up again, begin to have fun with the process, and the creativity starts flowing again. 

Once you've calmed down, mentally, you can usually make progress on the "important" piece of writing, the one that felt blocked.  That's one reason I have several blogs at the moment.  I burned out on writing my BMX stories, and I have 3 or 4 other themes I want to write about these days.  I sit down every day, and one will seem like the most interesting at the time, so that's what I write.  I write enough that I manage 1 to 4 blog posts a week, or more, on each blog.  Bouncing back and forth between them helps keep it fresh.  Generally, I don't recommend having 4 blogs, like me, I'm just going in several directions these days.  But having a few different files on your hard drive, or on paper, where you can write completely different things, can help when one project just doesn't want to happen.  Those other files may add up someday, and become a whole new project, without you really trying. 

So those are my personal thoughts on "writer's block."  Like Seth, I don't think it's a real thing.  But there are definitely times when this idea or that one just isn't happening.  So try something else for a bit.  Then go back.  Most important, just keep writing something.  Like Seth says in the video above, if you do enough "bad" writing, some good stuff will come through, at some point.   

I'm literally sitting at the library right now, with pieces of a zine next to me.  My computer couldn't log into the wifi for some reason this morning.  So I started laying out the zine I'm working on, as I rebooted this, and checked that, until I got the wifi issue worked out.  Otherwise I probably would have wanted to smash my laptop against the wall, frustrated over the wifi problem.  That doesn't go over well in libraries, and is hard on laptops, so I worked on my zine a bit, and then came back to this blog post, after getting the wifi figured out.  So I actually do use these ideas above, that's part of how I get a lot of content created.  

Alright, go have some FUN writing something now.