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Writer’s Block – Write a Little to Write a Lot
By Deb Gallardo
I read some great advice today on what to do when you aren’t sure how to use what you’ve got in the way of random notes, data, and ideas for your writing, whether fiction or non-fiction.
In a way it’s related to “free writing,” an exercise I’m not fond of where you just start writing anything that comes to mind, including gibberish, to “prime the pump,” so to speak. (If you’ve never used a manual pump, the process of extracting water from a well requires adding a little water into the pipe, which speeds up the process of getting water to rise and pour forth. Good analogy for the writing process.)
In this instance, this isn’t an intentional exercise. When it happens, it does so spontaneously.
Let’s say you have only a few ideas about a story, a character, a scenario, etc. that you want to record so you don’t forget them. Perhaps it’s a paragraph that came to you while doing the dishes, a title that stirs your imagination, an idea for a protagonist that keeps haunting you — in other words, just a snippet of writing you want to archive so it’s not lost in the corners of your mind.
Why is this akin to priming the pump? When we start writing down (or typing) these fragments, we often end up inspired to write pages and pages of notes, whole sections of dialogue, a major chunk of story outline (or a complete outline!), or a full-blown character sketch.
Author Gene Wolfe sat down to write a novella. His Book of the New Sun ended up being more than 800 pages.
My point? It’s actually from bwritenow.com: “Write a little bit, even if it’s not long enough or good enough.”
And this additional piece of wisdom bears mentioning, too: “[Write] something that you can look at and say,’Okay, at least I did something,’ so that you can quit worrying.”
To read the article which inspired this post, go to bwritenow.com article.
I said near the beginning that this isn’t an intentional exercise, but it easily could be. Run, don’t walk, with any story scraps and mental musings to your favorite notepad or word processor and EXPRESS them. You may find this is just the priming your writer’s pump needs.
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