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I am grateful to Nicole Bianchi for a fascinating series of tips/strategies on how famous writers overcome writer’s block and reawaken their creativity. Her work is published on mission.org, part of the medium.org online publishing platform.
Nicole, from Raleigh, North Carolina, USA says: “Some writers argue that ‘writer’s block’ isn’t real. It’s just an excuse to use when we’d rather procrastinate than get to work on our writing projects. There’s a quote attributed to William Faulkner: ‘I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.’
“Similarly, in Jack London’s 1905 essay on how to become a published writer, London observed, “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.’ Nicole says: “London believed that writing daily was the best way to rouse the sleeping Muse. He advised: ‘Set yourself a ‘stint,’ and see that you do that ‘stint’ each day; you will have more words to your credit at the end of the year.’
Sounds fairly straightforward doesn’t it? And yet many other famous authors found that it wasn’t as simple as that, and there were often times when they were stuck. Here’s Franz Kafka, for example: ‘How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing. It doesn’t come off. A page now and then is successful, but I can’t keep it up, the next day I am powerless.’
Nicole adds: “Maybe you’re like me and sometimes feel more like Kafka than Faulkner and London. You sit down at your computer to begin writing, but instead you find yourself having a stare down with the blank screen. You may type a few lines, but after several minutes you delete everything. You just can’t seem to find the right words to continue. It’s as if your inspiration inkwell has suddenly dried up. What can you do? How can you get back in your creative flow?
“Thankfully, many famous writers have shared their methods for how they overcame dry periods and became successful writers.”
We’ll look at Nicole’s strategies over the next week or so. Here’s the first:
The cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat
Many writers, even though they will avoid the cliché, believe that ‘practice makes perfect’, and that you need to write something each day. Nicole says: “The trick is not to overthink it. Write nonsense if you have to. But keep writing, no matter if you’re pleased with the final result or not.”
She quotes Maya Angelou in her book Writers Dreaming: “I suppose I do get ‘blocked’ sometimes, but I don’t like to call it that. That seems to give it more power than I want it to have. What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’ you know. And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’”
A
nd here’s another strategy for successful writing: join us on Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran’s uniquely inspiring Scriptwriting course at the Watermill this September. We can offer you an extraordinary week, ‘away from it all’, so you can concentrate on learning how to write scripts for TV, films and theatre, and at the same time enjoy beautiful scenery, first-class accommodation, wonderful food and good conversation with like-minded people. We will guarantee to unblock you, inspire you and above all enjoying your writing.
Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran are famous for such TV hits as Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart, The New Statesman and Shine on Harvey Moon. And in a new incarnation, they’ve written hit stage musicals, such as Dreamboats and Petticoats and Save the Last Dance for Me, as well as film scripts and award-winning stage, TV and radio plays. It’s not just comedy: Marks and Gran are producing serious dramatic works as well. Laurence and Maurice’s course will show you how to craft your work from your original idea through structure, character, plot and finally, script. They will lead you slowly through what makes classic television comedy, using one-to-one tutorials, team writing sessions, and most enlightening of all, studying films and TV series that have become ‘classics’. They cannot guarantee success, of course, but they promise that you will leave the Watermill a considerably better scriptwriter than when you arrived.
It’ll be extraordinarily good fun too!
Listening to words of wisdom on the vine verandah.
Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran7 – 14 September 2019 Four or five places left
To learn more about Laurence and Maurice and to register an interest in their course at the mill, please visit their 2019 Profile Page.
