Chaining Writer's Block
- Tom Barnett
- May 12
- 5 min read
Art brightens the darker moments of our lives, lifting us up from the mundane and offering glimpses of the world as we wish it could be. Visual arts whisper to our eyes, music guides the beat of our hearts, food tempts our resolve, and sculpture dances beneath our questing fingertips. And of course, there’s writing to weave our senses together into a waking vision that somehow blinds us to our surroundings while opening the mind’s eye to the infinite potential of our dreams.
The arts overlap more than they might appear at first glance. Painters sketch the layout of their scene before the first bit of paint touches the canvas. Sculptors build a foundation on which they slowly add details until the shape before them matches the one in their imagination. Chefs gather ingredients and add them in specific ways instead of just dumping everything into a pot and hanging it over the fire. In short, no artist, regardless of their media, starts at one end and shapes everything down to the finest detail in one pass. Yet when it comes to writing, many aspiring authors try to do just that.
Now, before I ruffle any feathers, I’m not trying to say that writer’s block isn’t real or that I’m too good to get it. What I am offering is a tool to reduce its frequency and prevent it from taking root in the first place.
The seed of my method grew from a scene in Mercedes Lackey’s Jinx High in which the protagonist taught a high school writing class. She told them that, as a professional writer, she had no time for writer’s block. Bills and deadlines didn’t allow her the luxury of ranting about the injustice of a tight-lipped muse. Instead of whining when she hit a snag, she simply went back in her writing to find the place where it stopped making sense and pruned the story back to that point. Then she started writing again from there.
That sounds simple enough, and I can testify that it does indeed work. However, it can be as painful as surgery without anesthesia for those of us who become overly attached to what we’ve written. I remember once when I’d been lured astray by a character with a seductively interesting background. Her story was a thing of beauty and probably should have been a novel unto itself. The writing that followed came so easily that I didn’t notice at first when my ideas of what should come next dried up altogether. I tried all of the usual methods to get the creative muse talking again: dancing naked in the light of a full moon, human sacrifice, etc. Nothing helped. Then I remembered what Lackey had advised. I had to backtrack through nearly ninety pages to find where that character made my intended ending impossible. Hitting the delete button and watching over a week’s worth of perfectly good writing evaporate was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Although it worked, it showed me that my writing methods weren’t working. In order to prevent it from happening again, I needed to understand not only the what of writer’s block but the why of it as well.
After some soul searching, I traced my problem to not knowing exactly where I was going with the story. My plan for that book consisted of little more than a handful of disjointed scenes and a vague sense of how the series should end. Up until that point, I’d just been letting my imagination lead me around in circles in the hope that I’d eventually run into everything my story needed by chance. So I took a deep breath, sat down with one of those yellow legal pads and started to outline. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as “writing,” but I noticed almost immediately that there were more problems than I’d first suspected. When I was finally done with the outline and started writing again, my yellow pad felt more like a cheat sheet than a burden. Gone were the hours of staring off into space or raiding the fridge. Every time I finished a scene, I looked at the yellow tablet which magically knew what I needed to write next. I went from typing three or four pages a day to two or three chapters. Best of all, when I looked back over them, I realized they were better than what I’d written before!
In hindsight, I didn’t come to the poor habits that caused my writer’s block by chance. Several writing coaches in college assured me that planning stifled creativity. “Don’t outline,” they’d advised. “Don’t spend so much time planning that you stifle your creative spark and suffocate your story before it even breathes its first breath!”
Outlining seemed like an awful lot of extra work, and the idea of just “doing it the easy way” appealed to me. Furthermore, there seemed to be tons of “real” writers out there who advocated the same thing. Who was I to argue with the experts when they were saying exactly what I wanted to hear?
As an older writer with far more experience, I call bullshit. Most authors who show you a finely polished manuscript and tell you that it’s a first draft are lying through their teeth. As for the handful who are telling the truth, I’d argue that their results are often hit or miss, and frequently devolve into islands of beautiful prose surrounded by chaotic plots filled with inconsistencies. Appealing as this might be on an artistic level, making a reader work that hard to follow the narrative greatly increases the probability that the book will end up on the nightstand unfinished.
No one is saying that every writer needs a formal outline complete with Roman numerals that details every nuance of the plot. The important thing is to create a “big picture” overview and know the lay of the land before beginning any literary journey.
For those still arguing that writing is hard enough without all of that “extra work,” I ask you this: How much of your time do you actually spend writing compared to the amount that you spend staring off into space trying to figure out what you’re going to write next? The writer who choses to do it “the easy way” still has to come up with ideas, figure out how all of the pieces should fit together and turn them all into something appealing to a reader. They’re just trying to complete all of those tasks in their heads at the same time. No wonder they’re always so frustrated and exhausted!
Is a good outline a foolproof way to ward off writer’s block? No, it will still happen from time to time. But when you know where you’re going, it’s much easier to realize when you’re writing yourself into a corner. That way, it won’t take you ninety pages to realize you took a wrong turn and find your way back.

Comments