We’re going to spend this month talking about tricks of the trade that work in one day. There are a lot of them, and with all of us struggling to juggle work, family, social life, and writing (plus all that time we wind up paying attention to marketers to whom we don’t even want to pay attention). . .we need ’em.
This is all because last week I ran into to a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile who’s writing a memoir. I asked her how things were going. We talked a bit about a time a couple of years when she’d told me she was having a lot of trouble with it—she couldn’t make herself write a particular incident she needed to write.
She’d asked me if I had any advice: did she need a class? a group? a coach?
Now, I do this kind of work with writers all the time, helping them write what they need to write when they need to write it, so, yeah, I had some advice for her.
And I’ll give it to you too, in case you’re ever up against a similar block.
Groups and classes can help if all you need is a little peer pressure to get yourself in gear, but they can make it worse if you’re really struggling with an emotional block and find yourself embarrassed to be unable to break through, especially in front of others. So before you invest in anything try these two tricks:
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Permission
Give yourself permission to pause and write about this issue whenever it strikes you, even if it’s only a line or two between work projects that you can go back to and develop later.
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Details
Whenever you do have a chunk of time in which you’d like to write, focus first on recording some concrete, neutral, unrelated details—what you had for lunch, the view from where you’re sitting, some conversation you had recently—to kind of grease the writing wheels so the words will come out of you more easily.
Frequently it’s the effort to make two transitions at once (the transition into writing mode plus the transition into a safe emotional space) that can cause this kind of writer’s block, and it helps to take them one at a time.
Remember: you’re writing what you write not to bind yourself ever-more tightly in your painful emotional paralysis, but to free yourself so you can live this one life you get as fully as humanly possible.
NEXT WEEK: 3 Tricks for Increasing the Tension in Your Story in One Day
THE WEEK AFTER: 4 Tricks for Improving Your Fiction in One Day
FINALLY: 1 Secret Trick to Becoming a Genius Writer in 1 Day