When you sit down to write, do you just open the document and sit there staring at it for about an hour before getting anything done? We’ve all been victims of this. We sit down to write, all ready to get some serious progress made on our WIP (Work-In-Progress), but the second we get there our minds blank and we’re left wondering where the story goes next. I’ve been the victim of this particular brand of procrastination many times, but I’ve found a way to deal with it. When I find myself stuck on what to do next, I open up a new document and write the first thing that comes to mind.
Sometimes, I don’t know what that thing is until I’m writing it. Often, it’s some story I didn’t realize I even wanted to write, but most often, it’s absolute garbage. After I bang out about one hundred words of nonsense, I switch over to my WIP, and start writing. Often it’s just the fact that I need to get started and get the words flowing that helps me engage my brain into writing mode and get the words out onto paper. As for the hundred words I wrote on the other document? If I feel there’s something there, I save it to a folder called Garbage Inspiration to look at later. If not, I don’t save it and condemn the piece to the trash bin. what matters is that what I wrote prevented me from staring at the words on on my WIP, or worse, going back and rereading the entire piece just to try and get started again.
Rereading what I already wrote often disengages my writer brain entirely, and engages my reader brain instead. So when I get to the end, where I’m supposed to be writing, I find myself frustrated that I don’t know what happens next. Then I’m let trying to figure out what happens, when all my brain wants to do is read on. Not to mention, when you reread a WIP, you’re tempted to edit. Editing is the anathema of writing. You need to write your WIP to the end before you start editing. In addition, it can be time consuming to reread your writing, and that’s time you can spend writing and making progress.
However, by allowing myself to write one hundred quick words of trash, my brain gets used to writing, and I can finally start making progress. The key to this tip, is not to open another document and spend an hour staring at that because you don’t know what to write. Just write something, literally anything to get started. It can be a famous quote from your favorite author, a line from a book you read that stuck with you, the worst pun in the universe, or a sentence that doesn’t make any sense grammatically. What’s important is that you’ve started writing without the pressure to advance your work and write well. once you’ve started, don’t stop. Stopping before you get to hundred words isn’t allowed. You write one sentence after another until you’ve reached your goal, and by then you’ve hopefully made something that has engage the creative part of your writer brain to start advancing the plot in your WIP.
You can even write about your frustrations that you don’t know what happens next in the story and cuss out all the main characters for not providing you the answer, and hopefully by the end you’ll no longer be stuck. I find that venting to the void is a good way to start getting the words to flow and helps relieve my anger at procrastinating when all I want to do is get some real work done.
Drawing, sports, and other activities require warm-ups, so why not writing? I hope this works for you as well as it does for me. Because the last thing we all want when writing. is to hit a roadblock and not know what to do next. I find these roadblocks often hit right when I’m sitting down, at the computer, ready to write, so try out this trick the next time it happens so you don’t waste too much time staring, and not enough time writing.
