Getting started when you're stuck by Alex English

It seems like ages ago when I wrote about keeping going in the summer holidays. Today was the day that my kids (finally!) went back to school and no longer could I put off getting started on the second draft of my first middle-grade novel. I’ve been dying to get stuck in for weeks, but my first major edit is the intimidiating prospect of writing a whole new chapter. The more I thought about it the more stuck I got. Today I made a breakthrough, though. Here’s how I did it:

 

1. Just write, stupid!

Yes, it’s an obvious one. Thinking about writing isn’t writing. Worrying about a new chapter isn’t writing a new chapter. To break myself out of my funk I started by setting a timer for 15 minutes, got my trusty fountain pen and a scruffy old notebook and started free-writing around my character and the scene I had very sketchily thought about.  Within a few minutes, the ideas started flowing along with my ink. I was back with my characters and they took over.

The trick is not to put too much pressure on. If you feel like the first line has to be perfect you never get started. But if your only plan is to put pen to paper for 15 minutes, it’s amazing what comes out.

 

2. Go for a walk

People talk about this all the time but it really works. There’s something about walking around that gets both the blood and the ideas flowing, and September is the perfect time of year for a stroll. If I’m feeling tense or worried about something, walking around outside amongst the trees instantly helps. If it's rainy, I stick on Spotify and have a dance by myself in the kitchen.

 

3. Better still, walk and dictate

Many of us have spoken about the benefits of dictation before, and I find I’m using it more and more. In fact I’m dictating this blog post on my iPhone whilst cooking a sweet potato vindaloo! If you have an iPhone, all the software you need is built in. I record using the standard notes programme, and upload to my computer at the end of the day. I love this for getting words on the page when I'm under deadline pressure.

 

4. If in doubt, change it up

In all today, I wrote 1,000 words of my new first chapter and have plenty of ideas for the rest. I did this through a combination of methods: dictating on the way back from the school run into my phone, typing directly into my computer when I got back, free-writing with pen and ink, and finally dictating my free writes into my laptop afterwards.

Not too shabby considering I had no clue how I was going to get started this morning.


How do you break yourself out of a writing funk, or get creative when you're feeling tense and under pressure?


Alex English is a graduate of Bath Spa University's MA Writing for Young People. Her picture books Yuck said the Yak, Pirates Don't Drive Diggers and Mine Mine Mine said the Porcupine are published by Maverick Arts Publishing. More picture books and her first middle-grade novel are forthcoming in 2020/2021/2022.
www.alexenglish.co.uk

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

How to make your brain solve a problem while you're away ... by Sophia Bennett

I've just booked our summer holiday. Yes! We're going to Devon for a few days, to the kind of place the Famous Five would have recognised - an area redolent of wreckers, sublimely beautiful with a hint of historic danger. I'm practically there already.

But first I have to work, to earn the price of a few nights of fish and chips, and maybe the odd massage if I'm very lucky ...

And on Thursday I'm running a workshop for research students at my local university hospital. They're working on life-saving ideas to treat cancer, and neonatal diseases and MRSA. I know I wouldn't be able to understand their research in detail, but I can help them write. I can also help them think about writing. And I thought today I'd share the exercise I most enjoyed doing when it was given to me, and I was a participant. It was given by Heather Dyer, at an event I did with the Royal Literary Fund. Of everything we did that day, it was the simplest and easiest to reproduce.

It goes like this.

We're going to do some free writing. You're going to spend a minute or two thinking of a problem that's on your mind at the moment. It might be something in your work in progress, or something in real life (that life that seems to fade into the background when the WIP is going really well). There. Are you thinking about it?

Great. Now we're going to write for three minutes. And the rule is simply this: you have to keep writing that whole time. We're after quantity, not quality. No pausing for thought, no pausing full stop. If you can't think what say then just write the last word you wrote down before your brain dried up and keep writing it until the thoughts come flowing back again. OK? Three minutes. And I want you to write about ...

What the solution to the problem isn't.

Got that? Three minutes. Go.

...
...
...

Done? Lovely.

Did your brain fight back? Mine did, when I did the exercise. It started off magnificently explaining a couple of solutions that would never work and then after about a minute it deliberately, mischievously decided to ignore the clear instruction and start to tell me what the solution to the problem was.

What to do? To obey the instruction to keep writing, which didn't give me time to work out how to tell my brain to behave, or to follow what it was telling me to write instead?

How you choose to write is up to you.

I loved that exercise. But that was just part one. Heather then told us to look through what we'd written and find two words that stood out, then spend a few seconds thinking about those words, then ... three more minutes of free-writing - whatever came to us, this time. And in those two exercises combined I solved three major stumbling blocks (can you solve a block? you know what I mean) about how to tackle the narration of my latest story idea.

It's a simple premise: our brains often like to solve problems subconsciously, when we're thinking about something else. Sometimes we just have to give them room to do that work, and grab onto the results and go with them when they come. I'm hoping that my days in Devon will give my brain a similar opportunity to go off and have fun while I stare out towards Burgh Island, so beloved of Agatha Christie, then come back to me with a series of problems solved.

We'll see what happens. And if it doesn't work this time, there's always the fish and chips.