When writing daily is like eating healthy

I don't do New Years resolutions, but as it happened I made one that pretty much coincided with the new year. I was walking around New York Monday thinking how hard it was to go back there. It's where I grew up partly, and I lived there later, but I have few friends and roots left there. I find in psychologically difficult to go in anymore. Still, I knew it was the right thing to do, and so I forced myself to go in and meet a friend for lunch. I had had the whole week off, but was still stressed from work, even dreaming about it at night.

Anyway, as I was walking down Eighth toward my friend's office, it occurred to me that if I focused on only TWO things this coming year besides parenting--that is, two things concerning me and only me--that I could keep myself sane and moderately content. The first thing was about food, the second about writing the novel. It occurred to me that if I regarded the writing like the food, I'd do well.

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Why Famous Writers Should Complain About Writing

Anne Lamott says ”Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.”  Writers, if you don’t feel that way—if you happen to find writing effortless and easy—do the rest of us a favor and lie.

J.K. Rowling apparently wrote the complete story arc for the Harry Potter series on a long train ride, and then wrote most of Sorcerer’s Stone in cafes while her new baby was napping. Napping??? People, I was barely groomed the first year of my child’s life, let alone able to churn out a groundbreaking, genre-busting bestseller. It’s true that Rowling was on welfare at the time, her manuscript was rejected repeatedly before going on to revolutionize the industry, and from what I’ve read, all that success couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. But still. Jo, couldn’t you have worked up some writing block story to make the rest of us feel a little better?

By way of contrast, I give you Michael Chabon's story of writing The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.

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Recipe for Writing Success

We all have our tried-and-true recipes that we return to time after time for potlucks, dinner parties, or family meals. But what is your recipe for writing success?

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Staring at a blank page (or screen)

As I was brainstorming for my blog post, I was determined to write a post that was relevant, interesting, inspiring, and witty. I had no trouble deciding between multiple ideas. Because I had absolutely no ideas to choose from.

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Writing Funny

I like to inject a fair amount of humor into my work. I don't write a lot of slapstick or ROTFLMAO stuff, but I hope my readers are giggling frequently. Lately, due to some personal circumstances, I've had a hard time writing at all, let alone writing funny.

I needed a way to combat my writing inertia and get me and my characters out of their gloom. So I invented a writing exercise. At least, I don't know of anyone else who has done this before. Oh, except maybe Second City and other improvisational acting troops.

So here's what I do when the funny is missing.

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Fighting Writer's Block

Lately I have writer's block. Every time I sit down at the keyboard, I feel paralyzed. It doesn't immobilize me, but it does restrict my range of motion, dooming me to write the same stupid sentence over and over again. With modifiers. Without modifiers. Eventually the sentence just becomes a heap of words that I wouldn't waste wood pulp on. Oh, this feeling is bad. But I've been here before and I know what to do.

I have started to re-read Brenda Ueland's IF YOU WANT TO WRITE: A BOOK ABOUT ART, INDEPENDENCE AND SPIRIT. Brenda first published this book, which I consider to be the best one of its kind, in 1938. She based it on her experiences teaching writing classes in Minneapolis, after returning home from some wild Bohemian years as a freelance writer in New York City.

I discovered IF YOU WANT TO WRITE in the late 1980s by accident, as a staff pick in the now-defunct Shakespeare & Co. Bookstore on the Upper West Side, and it was the single thing that helped me through my first and worst writer's block, the one that lasted for years after college.

Here's just one of my favorite quotes from Brenda: "Inspiration doesn't come like a bolt, nor is it a kinetic, energetic striving, but it comes to us slowly and quietly and all the time...I learned that when writing you should not feel like Lord Byron on a mountaintop but like a child stringing beads in a kindergarten--happy, absorbed and putting one bead on after another."
What are your weapons agains writer's block? And do you have a favorite writer on writing?

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