Poverty of ideas: the fifth kind of creative block

My friend Kristi Holl, whose book Boundaries for Writers I recently reviewed here, shared a fantastic article on her Facebook page about creative block.

Seven Types of Creative Block (and What to Do About Them)

Since I just spent three frustrating hours yesterday staring blankly at my keyboard, this couldn't have come at a better time. 

The author, Mark McGuiness, talks about seven different kinds of block. As a solitary writer, only six of them concern me, but I confess that at one time or another, all six have been a factor. Sigh!

It's Block #5 that intrigues me the most. McGuiness writes:

5. Poverty.

I’m not just talking about money, although a lack of cash is a perennial problem for creatives. You could also be time-poor, knowledge-poor [italics my emphasis], have a threadbare network, or be short of equipment or other things you need to get the job done.

I had never thought of poverty in these terms before, but I like that way of looking at creative block. I think it was my problem yesterday. When the roofers working next door started playing insanely loud, insanely obnoxious radio music yesterday, I had to flee. I  packed up my portable office and sought out the cool peace of the stacks in the college library. It was the first day of the summer session, and I swear I was the only patron in the entire library. It should have been writer heaven, right?

Wrong! I sat there for nearly three hours and didn't get a thing done. Well, not true. I revised the last chapter I had written in my middle grade novel, but I couldn't make any headway in the new chapter. I couldn't see what the characters were doing. I had poverty of ideas.

I think perhaps the problem for me is that I was in a space where I felt constrained physically. Is there such a thing as a kinesthetic writer? That seems to be what I am, because my daily walks always seem to kick my mind into gear. This morning on my walk, the first line of the chapter came to me, whole and complete. And I suddenly had a clear visual image of where my characters were. Of course, I've got a stack of manuscripts coming in this morning to be edited, so no writing for me, not today.

But I'll jot down that line, and maybe storyboard the chapter on some index cards. It's like depositing money in the bank, so that when I am able to sit down to write, I won't be idea-poor again.

Good news!

It was a struggle yesterday to get to my desk. I was able to postpone that visit to the vet because Yukon's growth seems to be spontaneously shrinking. But I still had to take care of him, shoo my family down the driveway, finish all my chores and errands, and complete what I've started to call my morning rounds (this means checking and updating all my social media sites).

After all that, it was difficult to switch gears and go from mommy mode to writer mode. And at first I wasn't sure I was going to succeed. But I forced myself not to flee from my desk, not even when the 20,000 words of the book that I've already written seemed as foreign and incomprehensible to me as if someone else had penned them—in Klingon!

This is where the freewriting advice I've heard from so many others saved me. When you get stuck, don't stop—even if it means writing "I'm a worthless hack without a single original idea" over and over. OK, so you shouldn't write that! What I do is insert what I call placeholders into the manuscript. If I'm not sure what a character should say or do at any moment in a scene, I'll write something like, "Arlo has some reaction here." And then I'll move forward to write a real passage about the next thing that I do see clearly. This sounds stupid, but it always works for me. When I come back to that scene the next day, during revision, I will discover that now I do know what the character is doing. Then I'm able to take out that placeholder and weave in a snippet of dialogue, internal monologue, or action.

In the end, I was able to write a solid opening scene for my chapter after all. So now I can lead my characters down the cracked, weed-choked sidewalk and into the haunted house at last. What fun!

I had more good news this morning: I sold an article to the SCBWI Bulletin! Thank you, my dear friend Vijaya, for suggesting that I submit there in the first place.

The bad news though is that it's one of the pieces on my Free wisdom page, which means I have to temporarily take down. So I apologize, but the article about using a Kindle or iPad as a way to get fresh eyes when proofreading a manuscript will have to disappear from the site—just for a while.

However, the good thing about the SCBWI Bulletin is that unlike some other publications, you retain all rights to anything you publish there. So after a decent interval, I will be able to publish the proofreading article again.