(13) Filler — WIP — Writer’s Block Substack

I would highly recommend you skip this one, as I’ve already written on this; below is just some new text I was writing for my Substack post on Writer’s Block, which is currently a work in progress. It does count as me having written something, so I thought might as well post it (I also can’t stay up too late tonight). Look forward to better posts soon.

Ah, writer’s block. The grim reaper of your fanfic. The death of that song you were halfway done with. The drought on your canvas. It comes in like the seasonal flu — except it isn’t seasonal, nor does it go away so easily. It can make you just as sick though.

What is it that suddenly clogs your gears, that runs your pens dry (or keyboards… stuck ig, idk)? And how do you move past it?

Before I get into it though, let me ask you some more questions: when you got that writer’s block, did you start thinking your work wasn’t good enough? Like what you have so far sucks or doesn’t make sense, and you don’t wanna keep going? Or maybe the ideas just weren’t juicy enough to pen down? Or perhaps you took a few wrong steps into research hell, and can’t find your way back? We all have different reasons as to why we lose that spark. But ask yourself: how many of those times did you feel dissatisfied with what you had, or that it began to feel like a chore?

I am hardly one to talk about fixing writer’s block. I’ve gone for months and months writing absolutely nothing. But this is not an emerging problem — it’s been around for probably as long as art has been around. As such, there’s also a ton of advice by great authors and screenwriters already floating around — some of which I compiled here for you, because I observed an interesting pattern in them; the same golden bits of advice wrapped in different words. Do note though, that most of this advice is in context of ficiton writing, although they can be applied to all forms of writing (not so sure about the more visual artists among you).