A Block By Any Other Name

What do you call your writing stoppages? You know, those times when you just don’t feel like working on your novel? When you find yourself wondering what’s the point of writing a novel anyway?

It’s common for writers to experience this feeling in the middle of their novel. Middles… when you’re too far past the first blush of novel excitement and too far away from the adrenaline rush of the end. And you find yourself avoiding your novel for one day, then two, then it’s a week and your unfinished manuscript is just a distant nagging whisper that is easy to ignore.

I call that a slump as opposed to a block. It’s not that I’ve lost the words and don’t know what to write. It’s that I don’t care about writing. It seems pointless.

I’m in one of those myself. Been in this slump for a few months now. I’m still getting some things done, like this blog, but if you’ve been watching you’ve seen the posts get further apart as time went by. Because even blog writing is writing. And I just haven’t cared.

So how do you get out of a slump?

I’ve been turning over ideas in my head, trying to find something that would work. There are the standard things to try:

• Commit to writing only a paragraph (because it’s something down on paper, even if only a paragraph and you might catch fire and write more, if you’re lucky)
• Apply motivational tools like rewards and punishments – a good idea, if you will actually apply the rewards and punishments to yourself (something I have trouble with)
• Apply the Nike slogan and Just Do It – force yourself to start writing no matter how much you don’t want to (which I’m doing right now)

These haven’t really worked for me so far (other than I got a blog post out of my slumpiness).

So who’s got some suggestions? What do you do to get out of a slump?

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