Friday Q&A: How to Cure Writer’s Block

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Happy Friday!

Nora Roberts is one of the most successful authors of romance novels of all time, with more than 209 books published.

I’m not exactly in her demographic, and I can’t say that I’ve ever read her work, but I have one of her quotes saved forever in my notes: “I can fix a bad page, but I can’t fix a blank page.”

The way I deal with writer’s block is that I never let myself deal with it. Having writer’s block means that you’re making the choice between writing or not.

If you change the way you think about writing and shift the question to “am I going to write a good page or a bad page?”, you can change your output in a massive way.

Either way, you’ve got a page.

So if I’m having trouble thinking about what to write, I just write anything. I might simply take the working title of the post (the first thing I always write) and rewrite it in as many different ways as possible, leaving me with a full page of lines that essentially mean the same thing.

While nobody wants to read that, it’s something. And often, simply producing output like that will trigger creativity and the juice I need to actually write something good.

But either way, I write something.