Halfway into NaBloPoMo and I have writer’s block.
As defined on Wikipedia:
Writer's block is a non-medical condition, primarily associated with writing, in which an author is either unable to produce new work or experiences a creative slowdown.
Yeah that sounds about right, although not precisely. There are things I could write about, but it feels like an invisible barrier exists which is super expensive to pass through, and I don’t know if I’d be able to finish one of these ambitious posts or whether it’d be a waste of time.
I’ve experienced writer’s block before. Earlier this year I was finishing my final-year university dissertation. I had done a pretty nice project: a Pandoc filter for embedding CSV files into Markdown as tables, with some fancy transformation functions and a Domain-Specific Language. There were a lot of things to talk about: technologies I had chosen, decisions I had made, patterns I had implemented... but nothing wanted to move onto the page.
Getting the write-up off the ground was one of the hardest things I had ever done. It didn’t seem like I even had a place to start. Imagine thinking about and working on a project for 6 months, just to turn around and say “I have no comments”.
I felt so lost, terrified that all this hard work would fall apart in front of me.
At that point I remembered an article I read several years ago. Bringing this back to the forefront of my mind saved my dissertation.
Anne Lamott – Shit First Drafts
Funny and bold, three pages long, this got me from having nothing to having something.
The core concept – as one might imagine – is that you start by writing whatever you want in the first draft. Whatever you can. Anything at all. Get words onto the page, “better in than out”.
The result will be horrible.
I appreciate this line in particular:
The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I'd obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I'd worry that people would read what I'd written and believe that the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot.
Once you’ve written this atrocious piece of writing, you pick through to find solid chunks you can build around. A complete dump of everything in your brain will hopefully contain something pretty good. Take this and run with it: extend, enhance, embellish, etc.
I don’t know what you do if you can’t find any solid chunks. Find a new career?
This is the basis you build your second draft on. Once you’ve done this you move onto the
final draft – also known as the dental draft – where you inspect everything: checking for
unpleasantness, polishing, cutting out incoherent parts or anything which just isn’t that
good. Removing ten cases of the word that from a single paragraph.
Oh, I’m the only person who uses that too much?
All of a sudden you have something which resembles a finished piece, and all it took was severe mental turmoil.
So that’s what I did. Especially the ‘severe mental turmoil’ part. I’d write ridiculous paragraphs. I’d write about the same thing in two places. I’d write things that don’t reach an interesting conclusion, or I’d just write something which isn’t worth mentioning.
I will say however: I got shit done. All my thoughts from months of work, all in one place: ready for refinement, rewriting or removal.
One thing I learned from this whole process is that 45:33 by LCD Soundsystem is great for playing on repeat while writing.
I also learned you should give yourself a lot of time to write your dissertation. Like way more than you expect. It’s an immense quantity of work.
The main thing I learned is that when you have writer’s block, you really need to just get something out. Even if it’s bad, especially if it’s bad. Have absolute faith in yourself. Stake everything you’ve got on whatever swirls in your brain at that given moment, push forward with absolute conviction, write something awful and extract something spectacular.