How To Write When You Aren’t In The Mood (or Why I Don’t Believe in Writer’s Block)

You know that feeling when you just can’t be bothered? You stare at your laptop and you sigh.  You’re a third of the way into NaNoWriMo, several thousand words behind, and your novel is starting to feel like work. Your mind drifts off in search of new ideas or looking for some excuse not to write anything today. Don’t give in. Not now. Even Productive Procrastination will do you no favours during NaNoWriMo. Your goal is to generate a messy first draft and no form of procrastination is going to get the words on the page.

Be wary of calling this feeling ‘Writer’s Block’. Writer’s Block is not some magical affliction that strikes down promising young novelists. It's an excuse. It’s just easier to say ‘I have Writer's Block’ than it is to admit, even to yourself, that you don’t care enough about your writing to stay dedicated. And all fiction writers should be able to agree that the easy option is rarely the right one. You wouldn’t let your characters give up, would you? They persevere through the hard times – if they didn’t, you wouldn’t have much of a story to tell. So, if you won’t let them get away with it, why should you? You want to finish your story, don’t you? If so, the answer is simple, stop believing in the curse of Writer’s Block and accept that your disinterest in the story is probably something you can solve.

So what can you do?

There are a few tricks we can use to get ourselves out of these slumps.

The Writer's Ego

A quick google search on ‘the writer’s ego’ throws up plenty of articles about it being something we must get rid of, and a few about how fragile our egos are. But nothing much about the middle ground - the balancing act we need to survive, let alone succeed, as writers.

If you haven’t mastered it yet, you should make the development of ‘The Writer’s Ego’ a priority. The best way to do this depends on how you naturally feel about your writing and, by extension, yourself.

·         Some writers are too confident in their work. They believe, even at the beginning, that they are already writing bestsellers.

·         Some writers have no faith in their work. They believe that everything they do is derivative and boring.

Neither of these attitudes are helpful to a writer - at least, not alone.