Hey Writers! How I Use Midjourney to Shatter Writer’s Block
It’s time to consider Midjourney for more than just designing your book cover or movie poster
Do you ever suffer with writer’s block as an author? It’s that lengthy period of time where a writer can’t get an idea off the ground or maybe can’t think of anything worth writing about at all. Writing is like a muscle and no matter what your goals are with your writing, you must engage in the practice every day.
If you can manage to apply that kind of time to your writing, I’m willing to bet you are going to run into a different type of writer’s block and probably way more often than you like. I call them: Micro-Blocks.
I found a rather surprising solution for writer’s “un-blocking” — Midjourney.
Exceptional (Screen)writing through AI
I do most of my writing in the screenplay world. After writing for almost twenty years, it’s my favorite form of writing by far. I love the freedom of creating your own world and characters without the flowery prose or long drawn-out descriptions. Screenwriting is creative while being mechanical enough for my liking.
But even in scriptwriting, it’s common to hit a wall. I know the overall vision of where I’m going but I just can’t get a certain detail worked out. Maybe it’s a crucial decision on where to position someone next or how a character would behave in a certain situation. I call these moments “Micro-Blocks,” and I’ve recently developed a really interesting tool to help me deal with them — Midjourney and AI Image generation.
At the end of last year, I was turned on to a class by a friend of mine and well respected AI author on Medium, on how to perfect MidJourney realism that I was hoping I could use for some of my design work. At first, I was very resistant to the idea of letting any kind of AI touch my artwork. Not because I’m some elitist who thinks I can do it better, but more because I just want to be sure my art is a product of my own abilities and not a fake.
But I was blown away by an unintended consequence. The teacher of the course used the subject matter of professional human modeling and “photoshoots” to guide you through learning tools like Midjourney and Leonardo AI. I don’t operate in the “photographic” realm vocationally and for a moment struggled to consider how it could be valuable to me and my needs. I never thought I could stiffle my Micro-Blocks.
Within 40 minutes into the course, I was designing far more realistic and detailed imagery than I ever had before. Five minutes later, I started wondering what AI would think one of my most bad-mama-jama characters would look like in a certain scene I had been working on. It was a Micro-unblock!
In just the first five lessons of the Photorealism and Prompt Mastery class, I had this brand new, yet very familiar Chinese warrior in a modern-day suit standing right in front of me. This one simple exercise sparked my curiosity. As I continued to work through the tutorials, I started thinking of other reasons I encountered trouble in my writing.
After much thought and deliberation, I was able to boil it down to four basic areas of writing breakdown and wanted to see if MidJourney could help with solutions. The first was, of course, Micro-Blocks. That problem was now solved. The other three I wrote down were: Storyboarding, Character development, and World building.
Storyboarding
As my third grade teacher incessently informed me, I can’t draw! I’ve never been able to create more than pencil scratches. But using the prompt techniques from the Photorealism class, I was able to storyboard my own scenes in a realistic setting.
Now clearly, I didn’t just ask MidJourney to do my job for me. I learned how to tell it what I wanted, then see where things were missing. I didn’t quit poking around until it produced what I wanted. This helped me sharpen my descriptive tools as I got it closer to what I saw in my head. This, in turn, helped me write better scene headings and ultimately better descriptive action for the particular scene. It also saved hefty amounts on using a story board artist.
Character Design
The next item I started using went back to my first discovery with removing the Micro-Block. I started running my characters through Midjourney to get a better feel for who they could be. Again, not using the system to do the work but just using the visual to further develop the character.
A great example of this is my Chinese warrior. I had in my head this business-like guy who was buff enough to be intimidating but not so big he couldn’t clap or fit through the door. I also had a vision of business attire that might not look so out of place in Mad Max. By using the lessons from class, I was able to build him out and get a better feel for how he not only looked but how others would experience him as a result.
World Building
Now comes the lesson I really loved: World Building. World building in screenwriting can be the difference in a good script and a great one. You can sink a great story into a boring world and totally lose the essence of what you want to convey.
By building my world through the storyboards and overall images of huge scenes, I was able to better capture the essence of the themes, through the AI-generated places themselves. A great example is a scene I wrote using the setting of a futuristic looking IT building in the middle of Aukland, New Zealand. I used to spend time scouring Google for, say, images of tech firms in Aukland.
Having never been there and unable to find exactly what I was looking for I was left with something that felt out of place. Where in the city would it fit best? What other aspects of the landscape could the characters be responding to? I had so many questions but I wasn’t going to hop on a plane to New Zealand. The prompts worked to perfection. I could literally look up landmarks, plug them into the prompt language and see my little tech firm on the edge of the New Zealand town.
In Conclusion
Overall, the Photorealism class has been huge success for me and not just for learning the AI tools or creating pretty art or photography. If you’re experiencing micro-blocks or even long-term writer’s block, or you struggle with any of the areas of writing I’ve mentioned, I would strongly encourage you to check out the class. Learn the techniques and then apply them to your individual writing situation.
If you’re worried about keeping your authenticity, as I was, then remember, the goal is to replicate what you are seeing in your head, not get AI to do the work for you. Keep writing and working and I hope the lessons I’ve learned can be a help to you as well!
