Writers block is a MYTH!

[Edmund Lloyd Fletcher]

Very interesting video short by small business guru Seth Godin.

In case you aren’t into videos the argument goes like this:

Writers’ block is when our mind says “I cannot write”.  This is clearly a lie.  What?  Are your thumbs broken?  No, when you dig down into it, what you are really saying is, “I cannot write anything *perfect*”.  Well, that’s easy enough to overcome.  Just come to terms with the fact that what you write won’t be perfect, and then write it anyway.

Most likely you’ll surprise yourself, but even if not, you’ll at the very least be teaching yourself discipline.

Homeschooling father of 10, writing Christian action/adventure novels from my home high in the Rockies.

[Noah Cochran]

I like Seth Godin, Purple Cow is a great book. This is all true, but it’s essentially saying the same thing all writers tell you, which is “Push through it even if it means writing trash!”.

Very good advice though, and it’s always good to hear it again. 🙂

[Taylor Clogston]

This is true for a very specific kind of writer, one who is fine with reworking their book over and over until it works. That’s not going to work for many indie writers who need to be writing a good enough first draft, sending it to an editor, making one round of edits, and then publishing.

For that kind of writer, “writer’s block” means “I don’t know how this scene/etc. is supposed to work,” and they need to build the toolset to come up with a workable solution from uncertainty instead of just spamming the keyboard and worrying about it on a rewrite.

As someone who tends toward pantsing but also needs to quickly write “good enough” first drafts, I had to learn some plotting techniques like setting goals for big sections of a book and then moving to finer levels of granularity, or setting research goals where I have the goal of learning the basics of how a system generally works and then how it probably applies to my case (and then running it by someone who knows way more about it than me) instead of sitting down with a whole book or three about the subject mid-draft.

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