Tag: writer’s block

Dealing with writer’s block

Early in my freelance copywriting career, I suffered three serious episodes of writer’s block. I no longer have any memory of the assignments or why I was stuck, but I have an intense physical recollection of each attack.

At the time I was living in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, just below the reservoir. First time it happened, I decided I would pace around the park as a way to calm myself down. I remember a beautiful day, warm sun beating down, and me miserable because I got nothin’. I’d give myself a few minutes of strolling, then go home and sit down at the typewriter (yes, this was a while back), flail, repeat. I put on a lot of miles and probably got some sun damage that day.

During the second episode I got so agitated I could not eat. I was subsisting on peanut butter sandwiches at that time and I made one and cut it into bites and left them on the wraparound butcher block counter of the kitchen. Each time I passed I’d grab one of the bites and stick it in my mouth without looking. Some made it down, some didn’t.

The third must have been years later because I had a daisywheel printer (remember?) and my downstairs office. When writer’s block attacked, I decided I would just keep writing till I got it right. When I was finished, or maybe gave up, I pressed the print button on my Mac Plus (remember?) and page after page of virtual identical paragraphs spat out, a piece of evidence I still have posted on an office bulletin board.

I’m remembering this because I had a near-attack the other day, the first in many years. I was working on a large-scale, long term project (doing a new draft of my novel after it came back from an editor, to be specific) and I got to a part and realized it wasn’t very good. I started in, got stuck like a car with bald tires in snow, took a deep breath and backed off. Then, within a few hours, a number of short-turnaround paying projects came to life and I knew I would not return to the big project for a while. I also knew, from experience, that when I did return I would feel blocked.

So I gave myself an hour to return to the troublesome episode, and write through it. I actually came up with a solution that I think will work, but that was a bonus. The main thing was not to find myself greeted with failure and a problem when I next approached this project. I went through the black hole and came out the other side. The key to this technique was that I did not require the section to be any good. It simply needed to take my main character from point a to point b.

There’s another solution to writer’s block, which is to stop as soon as you feel it coming on. But this isn’t always possible when you’re on assignment. How about you? Am I the only one this happens to? If not, you might want to get my book. There are several ideas for curing writer’s block in there.

Dealing with copywriter’s block

I have been feeling very unproductive lately, looking for distractions and getting too few billable hours done in a day. Finally, today I tackled a project I had been putting off and finished it and afterward I felt like I’d dropped 10 pounds of mental fat. Though I didn’t realize it, I had been suffering from a chronic case of copywriter’s block.

Maybe it’s not as poetic as the creative seizings up of J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller and other legendarily blocked writers. But copywriter’s block is a very real problem with freelancer hacks and scribes because if you aren’t writing, you aren’t getting paid.

I had a couple of real serious blockages early in my freelance career and will share what I learned from them. The cause of most of my episodes was that I hadn’t done enough preparation before sitting down to write. I was trying to think, and nothing was coming out. A far better strategy is to do so much prep work—in terms of research and rough, non-wordsmithed notes—that giving yourself permission to actually write the thing comes as a blessed relief.

Sometimes we stumble over something in the actual process of writing…. very often, the first paragraph in a letter or article. (And yes, editors will tell you your work can almost always be improved by simply removing that first warm-up paragraph after you write it.)

I still have a multi-page printout of my tortured attempts to write the first paragraph of a letter for a TPA—that’s a particular kind of consultant that handles a company’s health plan. What on earth could I have needed to say about TPA’ing that was so difficult? I can’t remember but I know I felt like a dog chewing on itself until I had the good sense to finally step away from it. I took a walk in the sun, then came back and worked on something completely different. The next day, the TPA letter was completed without incident.

This recent writer’s block had a new set of circumstances. It was for a good client, but I found it somehow very uninteresting, yet I knew I had to do it because of our relationship. The concept of “you must” is toxic to the independent and supposedly carefree freelancer, who has signed on to the concept that you can set your own schedule and work any 24 hours in the day that you like.  But finally, writing it became more appealing than not writing it, and the deed was done. Now I’m going to celebrate by going to the library.