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There comes a time in nearly every big writing project when you just can’t seem to move forward. Maybe you’ve written yourself into a corner and aren’t sure how to get out of it, maybe the end just seems too far away to be reachable, or maybe you burned through your initial enthusiasm and it just isn’t fun any more.

The difference between a writer and a dabbler is what you do at that point. A lot of folks will give up – pack up their manuscript and put it away, telling themselves they’ll pick it up again when their inspiration returns. Unfortunately, it rarely does. The real writers are the ones who push through these hard moments, doing whatever they have to do to overcome or bypass the thorny problems that keep them from reaching the end of their manuscript.

There are many strategies a writer can use to get up and over the hump. Try some of these ideas to help you deal with your own writing challenges and get your project done.

1. Change the scene.

Not in your story but in your life. Most writers are acclimated to particular environments where they feel comfortable – we literally get conditioned to associate where we write with the act of writing, like Pavlov’s dogs (if Pavlov had trained dogs to write books). But the mental processes that make our usual writing places conducive to writing can work against us when frustration strikes. Facing the same problem in the same place every day can put you deep in a rut that’s hard to escape without changing things up.

Something as simple as writing somewhere new can be just the change you need to trigger a breakthrough. Take your laptop to a different room, or outside, or to the library, or to a coffee house. Drive out of town with a notebook and box of pencils and write in the mountains, the desert, or the woods. Head to the beach or a friend’s house or a hotel – whatever it takes to break the association between where you write and what you’re writing – or anxiously not writing.

2. Switch mediums.

Just as changing where you write can help loosen up whatever’s blocking your way, changing your medium can help get the creativity flowing. Writing with a pen or pencil has a different feel — and involves different parts of the brain – than writing on a computer. Even switching to a different keyboard or word processor might throw some switch deep in the recesses of your unconscious mind to get the idea machine powered up again.

3. Skip a bit.

It’s easy to get caught up in the narrative flow of your work, trying to write straight through from beginning to end. But there’s no rule that says you have to write in the same order your finished product will be. In fact, often jumping forward in a piece can help solve difficult problems, since you get a more concrete idea of where you have to get to when you go back to fill in.

For example, I recently saw Neil Gaiman talking about his recent work The Graveyard Book. After years of trying – and failing – to write the book from the beginning, Gaiman finally decided to start in the middle, writing what would become chapter 4 first. Once he did that, he said, he knew how the story got there and where it had to go – the rest of the book just fell into place.

4. Go random.

This is a brainstorming trick that can help you write through a difficult patch. The idea is, when you’re stuck, find something totally random and force yourself to work it into the text. Open a dictionary and pick a word with your eyes closed, spin around in the middle of the room and point – it doesn’t matter how, just find something accidental to inject into your work.

The goal here is to change up the problem you’re working through, thus shifting the mental process away from whatever’s got you stuck. Instead of trying to figure out how your killer got into the locked room, you’re trying to figure out how to work the word “asparagus” into the scene – freeing up your mental “gears” to work on the first problem in the background. You might end up cutting the random bit later, but by then it will have served its purpose – and who knows, you might like that part, too!

5. Take a break.

It’s a strange thing about our brains – much of their best work is done when we’re not paying conscious attention. That’s one reason why so many ideas strike in the shower or while you’re driving – with your mind preoccupied by the matters at hand, the unconscious mind is free to work on the thorny problems that are keeping you up at night.

The tricks I’ve listed so far all try to shake things up so the unconscious can do its job, but in many cases, just stopping whatever you’re doing and working on something else can be enough. When frustration strikes, get up and take a walk, go for a drive (assuming you have a really, really fuel-efficient vehicle; in fact, why not take the horse-and-buggy instead?), watch a mindless sitcom, write a letter to your grandma, wash the dog, or – why not? – take a shower. Just make sure you have something to write on so you’re ready when inspiration comes a-knockin’.

6. Write crap.

Probably 90% of the writer’s block in the world comes from perfectionism, the insidious need to bring forth polished brilliance with every keystroke or jab of the pen.

Feh!

Look, you’re going to revise. I know it, you know it, William Zinsser knows it. You have to trust yourself enough to recognize crappy writing when you revise – and if you do that, then you can relax a little bit now and put some crappy writing down for your later revising self to catch.

So, if you can’t figure out the right way to say something, say it the wrong way. Give characters out-of-character dialogue. Write purple prose. Use 40 adverbs in every sentence. Just get down the general idea of what should be there and move on. If you feel uncomfortable about besmirching your otherwise perfect (NOT!) manuscript with such foulness, go ahead and highlight it or make the font color red so you know you’ll catch it on your next pass, but whatever you do, don’t stop writing until you figure it out – just write.

Sooner or later you’ll get through the rough patch and the ideas will start flowing again – and you won’t have to waste time rebuilding your momentum.

7. Read.

This is really a variation on “Take a break” above, but reading offers writers something different from other activities – it reminds us of what we wanted to do and be in the first place. Letting yourself be transported away by a favorite author’s words can help you find your own writerly self and return to the task you love. Better yet, read crap – I find there’s nothing quite so inspiring as the thought of how utterly awful some of the stuff that makes it into print, and even onto best-seller lists, is. Nothing like lowering the bar a little bit to give yourself the strength to tackle your own creative problems.

There’s an old saying that if someone asks you how your writing’s going and you haven’t written that day, you can’t answer “badly”. For the writing to go badly, you have to be writing. You can always fix up bad writing; you can’t fix up no writing. In the end, the best way to deal with the problems that threaten to keep you from writing is to just keep on writing, no matter how bad the lines that flow from your pen or across your screen end up being. Because that’s what writers do – we write.

Good luck.

Image by sirwiseowl via Flickr

In my series on collecting and organizing ideas, I discussed mind-mapping as a brainstorming tool. Mind-mapping is a kind of free-association method in which ideas are generated by association with a central idea, and then each of the generated ideas in turn becomes a source of inspiration for further brainstorming. Mind-mapping is an interesting blend of right-brain creative exploration and left-brain order-making – although the graphic format and unboundedness of mind-mapping allows for unfettered ideation, the linking of ideas creates a self-organized final product. In fact, most mind-mapping software includes an option to export the seemingly unstructured “blob” of thought that appears on the screen into a neatly-formatted traditional outline, complete with Roman numerals and sub-headings.

Chuck Frey emailed me in response to my mention of mind-mapping to tell me about a post he’d just written on the future of mind-mapping software. His blog is “The MindMapping Software Blog, so we can probably assume that Chuck has spent more than a few minutes thinking about the subject.

According to Frey, mind-mapping software is still barely out of its infancy, and we can expect to see some interesting developments ahead as programmers develop software that allows us not only to visualize the connections between ideas in our heads, but the connections between those ideas and the vast wealth of data on the Web. “The mind map needs to become more of a ‘knowledge hub’,” he writes, “where information can be gathered, manipulated and analyzed.”

Returning to the present, one of the premier mind-mapping applications out there today is iMindMap, the only mind-mapping software officially endorsed by Tony Buzan, the main figure responsible for developing and popularizing mind-mapping. The developers of iMindMap have taken great pains to make the experience of creating mind-maps on the computer as close as possible to the experience of drawing them with pencil and paper. In addition to brainstorming, iMindMap supports a wide range of planning activities, and integrates well with both MS Office and OpenOffice.

iMindMap’s Ultimate version retails for $295 USD, putting it well out of the reach for many writers (including yours truly). But Emily Van Keogh of Buzan Online has offered to give away one free copy of the Ultimate edition to one of my readers.

Which means I get to have a contest!

Now, I could make it easy on you and ask you to send me an email and pick one at random, or something like that, but I want to get into the spirit of the thing. So to enter, I’m going to ask you to answer that oldest of questions posed to writers:

Where do you get your ideas?

You can enter in one of two ways. First, you can leave a comment on this post with your answer. The other way is to write a post of your own, in any public forum you have access too – your own website, LiveJournal, even Twitter if you’re that concise – and put a link to your post in the comments on this post. Just make sure that anyone can read your answer, wherever you decide to post it. (I’d appreciate a link back to the contest, too, but it’s not a requirement.)

Enter by the end of October – that’s the 31st of October for the calendrically-challenged – and I’ll randomly select one entry as a winner. Buzan Online will supply a download link and registration code. Make sure you include your email address in your comment so I can contact you if you’re the winner!

I’m looking forward to seeing your answers to this totally clichéd question. Let’s try to be creative and informative – maybe we can come up with the perfect answer and then nobody will have to ask it any more! And feel free to spread the word – the more the merrier!

Image via Wikipedia

While coming up with ideas might be easy, coming up with good ones is a bit harder. You increase your odds, of course, by coming up with lots and lots of ideas — out of a hundred or so, surely there ought to be one or two you can do something with!

Brainstorming is an effective way of coming up with tons of ideas. The idea is simple: just sit down, clear your head, and start writing down anything that comes to mind. Let your mind wander, and your pencil follow.

Of course, you don’t need fancy technology to brainstorm effectively — a pen or pencil and a piece of paper will do — but if you work at the computer a lot, it might be suitable to brainstorm in the same medium you write in. For simple brainstorming, an open word processor document will do.

Brainstorming, though, is rarely so simple. Many people find that a bit of structure is helpful — limitations often spark the greatest creativity, after all. Here are a few kinds of brainstorming exercises, some that can benefit from technological tools and some that can’t, that might be useful.

Forced Association

Jurgen Wolff told me about this on Lifehack Live. The idea is, write down a list of random words or phrases — maybe the first word on the first 10 pages of a book, or random words found flipping through a dictionary, or ten things on your desk, or whatever. Then force yourself to come up with one idea for each of them. Say you’re a fantasy writer, and somehow you’ve come up with “orange, computer, pen…” (for illustration purposes, I’ll just use three words).

• Orange: Yurok the Viking is surprised to discover an orange amid the frozen wastelands of the North.
• Computer: What would a computer look like in a fantasy setting? What would it do? Phineas the Magician sets out to create a magical machine to track the stars.
• Pen: A magical pen that, when used, creates the reality that’s written.

Are those great ideas? Maybe not — but they’re ideas. As you come up with more and more, you start to surprise yourself — your brain loosens up and starts really speculating. Which is great if you’re a speculative fiction writer, right?

Mind-mapping

Mind-mapping is a visual brainstorming technique in which a central theme is written in the middle of a page and random associations are “branched” off in connected circles. Check out Tony Buzan’s mind-mapping page for examples of how you can work with mind-maps and what you can do with them. Because mind-mapping is spatial instead of linear, they are supposed to allow your brain’s more creative side more free rein.

Although many mind-mappers find the physicality of pen or pencil on paper inspiring, others are just as comfortable working on a keyboard. What you may give up in physical intimacy with your medium is, for many, more than compensated for by the ability to easily save, search, and share their mind-maps. There are dozens of tools, some desktop-based and some accessed via the web, to make creating and storing digital mind-maps a breeze. Some free programs and services include:

• FreeMind: FreeMind is a free, open-source program for your Mac, Linux, or Windows PC (you do need Java installed, however). Its powerful mind-mapping engine is quite simple to work with, and while the mind-maps you create with FreeMind won’t necessarily be the most beautiful in the world, they are functional.
• bubbl.us: bubbl.us is a free service that allows you to create very slick, attractive mind-maps online. You can work by yourself, or easily collaborate with others using the simple sharing features. The whole system is very visual — ideas can be color-coded, bubbles can be dragged around the screen, and emerging connections between ideas can be drawn in.
• Mindomo: Like bubbl.us, Mindomo is a web-based service, but geared somewhat more towards a professional audience — its mind-maps are less artsy and “chunky” than bubbl.us’. They are also much more flexible, with an interface that looks very much like Word 2007’s Ribbon Bar allowing you the ability to fine-tune shapes, fonts, colors, and much else.

Writing prompts

A writing prompt is an assignment, something you’re given to write about. “Write a 200-word essay on ‘What I did this summer’.” Some writers use these as warm-up exercises, to get into the rhythm of writing; others try to create original works around prompts.

There are several sources of free writing prompts online — some are just lists of topics, some post a new one every week, some will let you sign up to have one delivered by email at regular intervals (daily, weekly, etc.). Here’s a few:

• Language is a virus: Random prompt generator. Sample:Write as you think, as close as you can come to this, that is, put pen to paper and don’t stop. Experiment writing fast and writing slow.
• Prompt Generator: Another random prompt generator. Sample: “A home in the community has burned. Tell how you would help the family recover from the loss.”
• Creative Writing Prompts: Over three hundred prompts; mouse over them to see the prompt pop up. Sample: Write about a good thing gone bad.
• Writer’s Digest: A new prompt is on their homepage every week. This is the archive of past prompts. Sample:Babies typically talk in babbles that adults can’t understand. But one day, while at the park, you’re sitting on a bench next to two babies. They start their babbling, when all of a sudden you realize you can understand them. Even more, they are plotting a nefarious plan. Write this scene.
• Can Teach: A long list of questions to answer. Sample: What is a good neighbor?

Don’t be put off by the fact that some of these are intended for schoolchildren. The idea is to get some random thought to spark your imagination. And they can be equally as profound as the ones for professional writers — after all, Robert Frost wrote a not-too-shabby poem on the topic of “What is a good neighbor?”

Oblique Strategies

Created by artsy musician Brian Eno, Oblique Strategies is a set of cards. When you’re stuck, you pick one and do whatever it says.

Several online versions of Oblique Strategies exist, such as David Ray’s Oblique Strategies webpage. Click “Random Card” and something random comes up, like “Mechanicalize something idiosyncratic”. What does it mean? I don’t know — maybe your trusty hero has a machine that allows his mother’s voice to whisper in his ear? Maybe there’s a mechanic that fixes broken hearts — or breaks healed ones? It’s oblique, that’s the point!

photo credit: *L*u*z*a*

In honor of the launch of The Writer’s Technology Companion, I put together a huge collection of resources for writers at Lifehack.org today. Topics covered include:

• 10 Free Apps Every Writer Should Consider
• 10 Online Apps and Services Every Writer Should Check Out
• 10 Sites Every Writer Should Bookmark (Besides Lifehack)
• 30 Lifehack Posts Every Writer Should Read
• 5 Online Communities Every Writer Should Join

Here’s a little bonus, an online community I didn’t include in the Lifehack piece:

Nothing Binding: An online community for writers, with a forum and a special emphasis on audio and video content by writers and about writing. They also run a kind of “review exchange”, where writers can send a copy of their book to a reviewer and get a review they can use in press kits, on their website, or wherever they want. Nothing Binding is still pretty new — they have about 500 members so far — so there’s not a lot of content yet (and, less forgivably, the blog is still empty), but it seems like a fun and knowledgeable community.

Check out The Ultimate Writing Productivity Resource, and leave your own suggestions in the comments.