Dangerous Day Job

Writing can often be monstrously difficult. Sometimes it just feels like everything coming out of your brain, through your fingers, and onto the page is nothing but drivel. Thoughts that nobody would ever care to hear, much less put in the effort to seek out and read. The feeling in itself is so detrimental to the quality of the writing that it becomes a vicious cycle where fewer good ideas are able to flow because of the bad feelings, and fewer good ideas make the feeling worse because the writing declines. The cycle starts to reinforce itself, and it can feel insurmountable. The big question then, is how can the cycle be broken? How can a writer go from dreading the creative process to wanting to write again, and seeing good results? Honestly, I’m still working on that second part. Good results are lot harder to not only quantify, but consistently deliver. It could even be impossible to do so. The best writers sometimes put out a dud book, or fall into a writer’s block driven by the cycle described above. It is much, much easier on the other hand, to make the writing fun again. I think by focusing on the enjoyment of the task rather than the outcome, the quality of the writing will come naturally. Or at the very least, it will ensure that the output doesn’t stop flowing. A mediocre article or story can be fixed. Nonexistent writing on the other hand, can never be improved. Here are a few fun exercises I like to do that keep me writing through blocks, negative feelings, and lulls of inspiration.

1. Guy with a gun. I stole learned this one from James Scott Bell, who has a similar list of tools he uses for creating conflict, detailed in his book Conflict and Suspense. He learned it from Raymond Chandler, and given that this doesn’t seem like an overly complex idea, Chandler probably learned it from someone else. The concept is pretty simple; Take a scene you have in mind, maybe one you’ve already written or want to write (or even a well known scene from a movie or book if you need to) and have a guy with a gun show up. What happens next? Where did the guy with the gun come from? What’s their goal and what are they doing with a gun? How is this conflict resolved? These naturally occurring questions can really get the brain going after taking for granted that a guy with a gun shows up. I even used a guy with a gun exercise in my work in progress novel as a key scene, so this isn’t just a write it and forget it exercise.
2. Silly writing prompts. Similar to the guy with a gun, take a writing prompt, especially one that sounds silly, and commit really hard to the idea with a scene. Sometimes ideas die before they even hit the page because they sound too stupid, or too far fetched to make it work. This is of course, complete nonsense. People to this day are moved by outrageous myths from days long past. The Odyssey for example, a story where a bunch of soldiers build a giant wooden horse to sneak into Troy, and then the god of the sea Poseidon (who’s existence is just assumed to be common knowledge) gets mad because they didn’t praise him for helping them pull it off and curses them to wander the ocean more than a decade. Turning into the skid and writing something ridiculous can help shake off the feeling that everything you write is stupid and not worth it.
3. Journal from a character’s perspective without worrying about the overarching plot of the story. A detailed plot can become a hinderance when it gets too complicated, and writing something that doesn’t need a plot at all can be fun and refreshing. Try a journal from a character’s perspective, just a record of how they feel, or some idea they had. This doesn’t need a beginning, middle, or end, and can therefore be a lot more free flowing. I do this when I’m not sure where a character would go next and I need to get into their mindset. It’s fun and can be very enlightening.

Those are some of the most common exercises I like to do when I get stuck, and I hope you can have some fun with them as well. Let me know in the comments if any of these helped you have some fun.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley