“If you get stuck, walk away from your desk. Don't just stick there scowling at the problem or make a telephone call or go to a party; if you do, other people's words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient." ― Hilary Mantel
Beating Writer’s Block
Here's Three Simple Games
by Victor Rees
It’s a familiar scene. You’re sitting at your desk with your laptop open, notepad by your side. Maybe you’re at your favourite coffee shop and you’ve finally managed to bag one of the quiet tables. The setting is perfect to let just loose and write. Those poems you’ve been rolling around in your head, the first lines of that screenplay you’ve been toying with for weeks, now’s the time to start getting words down – but you dry up. Creatively you’re a spent match. Nothing is working, and all that energy and excitement begins leaking out of you like a punctured balloon.
Who hasn’t felt like this from time to time? Look around online and you’ll find any number of anecdotes from authors who’ve had to deal with writer’s block – in some particularly awful cases the effects have lasted for years. Elsewhere, psychologists will offer explanations for why and how it strikes, but knowing the cause doesn’t always help beat the problem. Writer’s block is an absolutely normal part of the process and shouldn’t be feared. The worse you make it seem in your head, the more it’ll haunt you like some insurmountable obstacle. Writing should be a mental workout, but anyone knows you don’t just run out of the house without first doing some stretches. I offer the following three games as creative stretching exercises, designed to tear down those barriers and get you ready to write the opus of your dreams. Each game is accompanied by one of my own attempts (to varying quality), just to show how easy it can be.
No 1. Group Loop
This is a game you can play when there’s other people around. Give everyone a piece of paper and ask them to write a line, as mundane or poetic as they like. Each person passes the paper along to the next, who uses that line as a prompt to write a different one below it. Before everyone passes this on again they fold over the sheet and cover the top sentence. This is repeated each time, meaning you only ever have one prompt to go by. When the final poems are unveiled, you’ll find a disconnected jumble of images that might still retain an echo of that original line. Here’s one of the poems that emerged when I tried this with a group of friends:
They said we’d never grow wings
They said the rains would never stop
Water breaks through the wrinkled cup
Pooling under the chair.
You left me to flounder, you left me to flop
You planted the seed, I yielded the crop.
It doesn’t make much sense, but it doesn’t have to. You can see how working together can help reduce the pressure of creating something solo. It’s a democratisation of the artistic process, and it helps that the right group of people can also make it really fun.
Understandably though, you can’t always have others around you. Writer’s block can strike when you feel most trapped inside your head – so the next couple exercises might be more useful for you.
No 2. Loosey Goosey
Automatic writing is often attributed to Chief Surrealist Andre Breton, but it’s so simple it feels unfair giving one man all the credit. You relax the mind and begin writing words on the page, letting the pen record mental associations or go on its own weird tangents. And that’s all there is to it! (Note – there is more to it, but we haven’t got space for that.) Here’s a short extract from a piece of automatic writing I attempted:
Bottom of the coffee cup looks like mud. Top a scum of grease. Splinter under table wood sharp. Top lips sweaty. Retina. Blue fills the screen like a laptop loading error messages rebooting water poured in hospital panics. Glasses. No glasses I move to adjust them from habit.
It’s complete nonsense, but that’s how you know you’re doing it right. Keeping this up for long enough can create a sensation approaching hypnosis – the more you relax, the more outlandish the writing might get. And as with all these games, the actual work you produce is far less important that the self-care that comes with it.
No 3. Restrict or Die
If automatic writing isn’t your thing, how about imposing some more limitations? Writers like the Oulipo poets or Stanislaw Lem worked around increasingly rigid restrictions of style, rhyme and meter to train themselves out of inertia. Polish sci-fi mastermind Lem is perhaps best known for his book Solaris (1961), but for our purposes we’ll be looking at his 1965 short story The Electronic Bard. It’s about a supercomputer built to produce poems to any requirement. When it gets programmed to compose a ballad about a haircut – in six rhymed lines – in which each word begins with the letter S – it sings the following:
“Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.
She scissored short. Sorely shorn,
Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,
Silently scheming,
Sightlessly seeking
Some savage, spectacular suicide.”
I can’t even imagine the agony a translator must have had converting that from the original Polish. I foolishly tried my own attempt, choosing as my subject the Victorian fairy painter, patricide and Bedlam patient Richard Dadd.
Dadd depicted devils dancing,
Dwarfish dukes, dimpled derrieres,
Dazzled dandies, dolts decanting,
Declining dawn’s delicious dares.
Dadd deliberates, doubt disguised.
Daddy, daddy, dead, despised.
So there you have it, three exercises that might help shake off the weight of writer’s block. I want to return to my earlier point that creative block shouldn’t be feared. It’s completely normal and should be accepted as part of any artistic process – but the more you try to fight it, the harder it might start to stick. So why not try to have some fun instead?
This week’s writer Victor Rees
My name is Victor, I'm an emerging writer currently finishing an MSc in Playwriting at Edinburgh University. Prior to this I completed my undergraduate degree studying English at Cambridge. I have a lot of experience with freelance work providing reviews, essays, poems and interviews for print and online publications. As a student I self-published a literary magazine called Matches that ran for two years, for which I wrote editorials and columns giving writing tips to aspiring authors.
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