Blockage

[BJ Swabb]

Hey ya'll! I am currently in a state of where I can not regain focus or interest in continuing writing. A block of passion has left me for some reason. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get my passion back into writing? I could use all the help I can get to get motivated again.

 

[Logomancer]

Try doing something else for a while. Go for a walk, listen to music, draw etc. Doing the same thing over and over again can lead to burnout, no matter how passionate you are about it.

 

[skip.knox]

There are many threads on this topic. Recommendations include
just write; write anything
don't just write; walk away and do something else
write something different like a short story or fanfic or summat
give up

That's pretty much it. To which I sometimes add:
Try any and all, but don't expect what worked last time will work this time. Art is hard.

In this case, though, I'll add something more. You asked how to get the passion back into the writing. The above advice addresses only how to get back to writing. As for the passion part, I don't have a clue.

 

[pmmg]

Well...for the writing part, make a strategy and stick to it. My strategy is to write at least one sentence a day. Anything else is not my promise, and is just a bonus. If you want to be a successful writer, you need the discipline to apply.

Passion is different. If its not in you, its not. and there is no crime in moving on to something else. Passion is a great thing, but you can watch the whole world go by while waiting for it. Waiting for passion is a bad strategy to complete anything. Passion, however, may tell you where you need to spend you energy to be happy. If its writing, it will come back.

A better question than passion is just what do you want?

 

[Logomancer]

Ask yourself why did you want to write in the first place. What motivates you?

 

[Demesnedenoir]

I think this is a paraphrase of King: Amateurs wait for inspiration; the rest of us do it. Something or another. I'm not a fan of King, and while inspiration and passion are great... sometimes you have to go full Nike and Just Do It. I don't like Nike either, their shoes are not good for my feet. Damn it! Why can't I find inspiration from someone or something I do like?

Oh wait! I think it was Hannibal Lector who said "sometimes you just have to make a meal out of what you got."

No, no. He didn't say that... I don't think. But I like that advice.

Me, I read what I wrote. If I don't like it, I work on it. If I do like it, it tends to move me forward.

 

[skip.knox]

To speak to the passion part, my experience is similar to that of many other writers; namely, it's a compulsion. It's impossible for me not to write. Whether I enjoy the process or not is irrelevant. And the business of passion or love or similar emotions feels like it belongs to another world. It's like saying I have a passion for breathing.

 

[Naruzeldamaster]

Come up with an absurd idea involving Nyan Cat, the Three musketeers, and the Ring from Lord of the Rings and then Write it.
One of the Best forms of Pepto-Bismol for writers block is to sit down and write something else. The further out of your 'wheelhouse' you go the better.

Alternatively, sit down and write whatever you're procrastinating. I've had this happen a couple of times, and it was surprisingly easy to continue writing on a story once I get past whatever's causing the block to begin with.

Sometimes there's no way around a block, and ya just gotta admit you're procrastinating. then dust your shoulders off and keep on writing.

 

[J.MGreenhut]

I think there are two ways to look at this:

A) Everyone needs a break from time to time, and one of the reasons we "burn out" is that we aren't living diversified lives. In this instance, we have to find balance...something I am shamefully inept at doing, and you may be too.

B) If we find ourselves falling into the "I'm not inspired" trap we only need to look at the bricklayer, bus driver, or bricklayer. They never entertain the idea that they aren't inspired to do their jobs. They just do their jobs because they have bills to pay and responsibilities to meet. Your entitled to take a break, and you know when that break has been long enough.

When the break is over and you're still uninspired, you get your ass in that chair and sit there for an hour a day. You don't have to write, but you can't do anything else but things that are writing-related. Read other authors, and watch videos about improving your diction. Go on vocabulary.com and enter the title of a book you love and learn that author's vocabulary. Study syntax. Go on Udemy and take one of the hundreds of courses on time management for authors. Study the foundations of poetry. One of David Farland's biggest beef with his students was our lack of interest in poetry. There is a fluidity and lyricism that eludes fantasy writers as we constantly ingest each other's work to the exclusion of other genres. Read outside your genre. Spend time focusing on your social media presence. Get that website and blog up. That's a shitload of stuff to do in one hour. Lol.

By the way you were inspired enough to log on and ask the question.

 

[Penpilot]

I thought about writing a response to this, but then, I thought that someone else closer to your situation might have something to say here first. That person is... well... me... but its the 2008 version, just a little removed from finishing my first novel. I wrote the following in 2008. Apologies for a bit of the edgelord vibe to it. Mildly edited for a bit of a cringe analogy. But the general point still holds.

The muse is a big fat lazy witch that wants to do nothing but eat bon-bons and watch Oprah all day long. That right I said it.

After finishing my first novel and doing rewrites to it, I found that I achieved so much more if I didn’t wait around for my muse to get up off the crumb riddled couch. Sometimes you just have to write whether you’re feeling it or not. You put on the greased stained, wife-beater, tank top, grab that witch by the hair. drag--. Ahhhhhem!!!. (present day me interrupting **glances over at 2008 me and shakes head** Let's just say you take things under your own control. Push the muse aside and get to work one key stroke at a time.)

This isn’t to say that the muse and inspiration doesn’t have its place, but I’ve come to the realization that those things alone will only take you so far before you hit a wall, and you’re left with two choices in my opinion: start something else that you’re “inspired” about or roll up the sleeves and go to work.

As I’m going through the rewrites to my novel, I find myself remembering things said by my collage writing teacher. He told the class that one of the purposes of writing for the course was to empty ourselves. I wasn’t sure what he meant back then, but I think I have an idea now. You see, as you write, the more you write, you purge yourself of all the pent up ideas, all the preconceptions and expectations that get built up over time about what you want to write and how you want to write it. This allows you to just write and let the words come instead of forcing them to be this or that instead of what they should be. In some ways, I think this means that you’re purging yourself of the dependence on the muse to get you to write, or to make your writing “good”.

The more writing I do in the “uninspired” state, the more I realize that the “uninspired” writing can be equal if not better than the “inspired” writing. I find that things that I wrote while “uninspired,” which I thought were complete trash, turn out, when looking at them from an objective eye, to be rather good. I’ve also found that the reverse is true too. Things I wrote while inspired, which I thought were brilliant, turn out to be trash.

This brings me to the thought/theory that I have, maybe, this is one of the things that separates a “successful” writer from a “struggling” one, of which I believe I'm somewhere just past struggling. The “struggler” can only write when they are inspired and passionate, while the “successful” one can write no matter the mental state. They can just do it. Just a thought.

When things get tough, I always ask myself "Do you really want to do this today?" Sometimes the answer is no. And that's fine. There's no writing police that comes to get you if you don't write. Just because I have ideas doesn't mean I have to use them. But, for me, most days it's yes, because I want to find out what happens in the story, so I sit down and get to work. Sometimes the production is just a handful of worlds. Sometimes it's a lot more. But if the no days start to outnumber the yes days I'll start to question if I really want to write at all.

When I started to take writing a little more serious, two things I think were key to helping me along. The first thing, I started to listen to lots of writing podcasts. Listening to other writers talk about writing and about how they did things helped me understand what the writing process was really like. It's harder and easier than what's the general populous thinks. It's hard because it's work. It's not an explosion of inspiration and an avalanche of words. Sometimes can be, but mostly it's not. To me, it's like trying to solve a very complex puzzle, where you're not always 100% sure what the puzzle is even asking, or if it even has a solution. It's easy because you don't have put down a lot of words per day to be productive. Two thousand words a day is very productive. BUT even if all you do is put down 250 words a day, at the end of a year, that's a 90k word book. This post alone is well over 250 words.

The second thing I did to help me along was I was started reading books on writing. For me, books on writing structure helped a lot. It helped me organize my thoughts and ideas and started me down the road to figuring out how to start and finish a story. It helped me start asking the right questions. For me, asking myself the right question at the right time can help tremendously when I'm stuck. It doesn't always lead me to the right places, but it keeps me writing. And if I meander through all the wrong places, I'll eventually wander into the right place, or close enough to it. To me, it's better than standing still.

To me, bad writing is infinitely better than no writing at all. I can edit bad writing into something better. I can play with it. I can cringe or cry over it, or even sigh. A blank page... well... I can't do anything with that. It's nothing. It's the absence of emotion. It's like eating plain rice with a glass of water.

Give yourself permission to write something bad, silly, cringe. Something you hate with such passion that you'll have a clause put in your Will that all copies of it are to be burned, the ashes fed to pigs (evil pigs), evil so you don't feel bad when you have them strapped to a rocket and launched into a black hole to await the heat death of the universe.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I recently already wrote this before: inspiration and passion are highly overrated: creative stalling out

You don't need to be inspired to write. You just need to sit down and type.

 

[Finchbearer]

There are certainly some passionate bricklayers out there…