Lonely Reflections

At least once a month, maybe even once a week (when I’m especially unmotivated to write), it feels like I write headlong into a brick wall. It’s something every writer deals with, and every writer eventually figures out what to do with that wall. I’ve found there are really three main strategies:

• Break the wall: Write and write some more, even if you think it sucks or don’t see the point. Eventually you have a mass of prompts and ideas that you can reshape into something good.
• Scale the wall: Take a short break from the project giving you trouble and begin expanding other ideas you might have kicking around in your drafts. Sometimes you just need time for the creative well to fill.
• Disassemble the wall: For the truly analytical or masochistic authors among us, this involves hyper-analyzing (and often, overanalyzing) your work, attempting to figure out what the blockage is and how to resolve it in the most efficient way possible.

Unfortunately, I trend much more towards disassembling the wall. The benefit is that I often spare myself some rewriting, but the easy consequence of that is I don’t end up writing as much as I should at times. Analyzing a story is necessary; it’s a very vital skill to have during revision, and that goes double if you aren’t naturally gifted in the flow of storytelling (I’m not haha). But there is often a point where analyzing your story before it’s even drafted becomes a legitimate hindrance to the writing process as a whole. I have folders and folders of notes about this story I’ve been working on for years that is currently titled “The Loneliest Reflection”. Hey that’s the title of the- Yes. This story truly haunts me because I have drafted at least six different versions of it, and yet I still don’t feel as though I’ve solved it. My point is that, in recent years, I’ve fallen into the trap of overanalyzing it instead of just… writing. Some stories really do require you to just write, and find 50 different ways it doesn’t work before finally hitting that one that is satisfying. Hopefully I’ll be able to confidently post this page’s namesake story in the next few months for you guys to enjoy.

So to my fellow disassemblers, don’t forget you can try blowing up the wall instead of staring at it for months. And if that doesn’t work, let it rest so you can come back with heavier ordinance later. There’s always another story just around the corner, waiting to be told.

I’d love to hear from other writers though, how do you overcome the wall?