Released on: March 10, 2008, 12:35 am

Press Release Author: For More Free Resources visit www.allfreereports.com

Industry: Management

Press Release Summary: I may as well just say it. Writer's block, I'm convinced,
doesn't exist. Mostly, I think, authors use writer's block as an excuse to explain
to themselves, an editor, or a concerned spouse why the book isn't done or the
chapter hasn't been turned in.

Press Release Body: I may as well just say it. Writer's block, I'm convinced,
doesn't exist. Mostly, I think, authors use writer's block as an excuse to explain
to themselves, an editor, or a concerned spouse why the book isn't done or the
chapter hasn't been turned in.
Writing is talking on paper. Sometimes literally. And you never hear someone say, "I
can't talk anymore. I've got talker's block. There just aren't words there that can
come out."
That said, there are several common traps that new writers especially stumble
into-and these traps stop writing progress.
Size Matters
One of the easiest traps is letting the sheer size of book stop writing, as
mentioned earlier. The prospect of writing 300 pages is daunting. Especially that
first day you sit down. It's easy, especially if you're inexperienced or emotionally
worn out, to collapse under the mental burden of all that work.
The mental trick, I suggest, is to not think about those sorts of numbers when
you're writing. You need to bite off reasonably sized chunks and focus your energy
and anxiety on just today's chunk.
If you're writing in the morning before you have to go to standard job, maybe you
should do a thousand words a day. A thousand words is a bit of stretch but still a
manageable goal. And if you pace yourself and write, for example, a thousand words a
day, at the end of the week, you've maybe got a chapter done. And at the end of four
months, your book is done. That's how it works.
Don't sit down each day with the burden of writing 80,000 words or 300 pages. Sit
down to your very manageable goal of writing a few hundred words. It makes all the
difference.
Bad Metrics
A second stumbling block relates to the first. While writers, editors and publishers
commonly use measurements like words or pages to specify how big a book should be,
you don't really build a book with words or pages. Books require more concrete
building blocks. And so, especially as you're trying to slog your way through the
first chapters of a book (always the hardest for me, quite truthfully) you can't
think things like, well, so I now I need to write a thousand words. Instead, you
need to sit down and write a book building block or two or three.
Let me provide an example here. When I write some book about computers or
technology, in essence, all I do is string together descriptions of facts,
instructions for using some tool, and real-life examples. And these are the building
blocks I use to create a book.
If I'm writing about how to use, for example, a word processor's grammar checking
tool, I might start by writing a paragraph that explains what the tool does. Then, I
might go on by providing descriptions of, say, the six steps you take to use the
tool. Finally, I might wrap up the discussion by showing how the tool works on some
example text. And when I finish writing up these three building blocks, I've got my
thousand words.
Do you see how that's different from saying that you're going to write a thousand
words? A thousand words is the goal. But that goal really doesn't help you grind
through your writing. In comparison, saying that you're going to briefly describe
the thing, provide some step-by-step instructions and give an example is concrete.
That concreteness helps you plod through the writing.
You're probably not going to write how-to books about technology. But you'll find
that you too build your book using a pretty small set of specific-to-your-genre
building blocks.
Don't fiction writers do this, for example? The novelist describes scenes, records
actions, crafts dialog and so on. And what this means again-remember that we're
talking about the myth of writer's block-is that if you're writing a mystery novel
you don't sit down with only the plan to write your thousand words. That's too
abstract.
You need to sit down planning to write some set of building blocks. Maybe today you
describe the hunting lodge as it looks when Petra and Michael discover the old man's
body. Maybe tomorrow, you craft the dialog that occurs when the police interrogate
Langston about the missing oil paintings.
Especially if you're having trouble achieving your daily word counts-and probably
even if you aren't-you need to use standard building blocks to construct your book.
The building blocks let you get the content onto the page.
Small Ideas Mean Big Problems
Let me also revisit something else I often saw when I was a book publisher.
Sometimes the real problem a writer is having is trying to turn a little idea into a
big book. Yet this problem is misdiagnosed as writer's block. Some topics don't
merit a book. They may be great topics, but optimal treatment maybe requires ten
page or fifty pages. But a book needs to be bigger than that.
I suggest that you can test your idea by writing a couple of example chapters and
then making sure there's not redundancy in those chapters and that there's still
good content available for two or three more unique chapters. That technique should
work. But let's say you didn't know that when you agreed to write a book. Or that my
suggested technique, unfortunately, didn't work in your special situation. What can
you do?
You're in a tough spot in this case. You need to expand the scope of your book
without screwing up the book's original purpose and justification. If I were you and
found myself in this position, I'd try to figure out how short I was coming up.
Like, am I fifty pages short? A hundred pages short? Once I had this information,
I'd brainstorm to develop a list of related topics that I could use to pad the book
or beef it up. Finally, If the book had already been sold, well, I'd probably
swallow my pride and have an honest conversation with the editor.
If you're only a little bit short, the fix is usually pretty easy. Publishers can
make a book seem larger by putting less text on a page or by using thicker paper. If
you're writing a nonfiction book, maybe you can throw in an appendix that covers
some tangentially related topic or some extended bibliography or a glossary. If
you're writing fiction, I'm actually not sure what you do. That's not my area of
expertise. Do you add characters? A subplot? I don't know. You better talk with your
editor.


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