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How To Get Rid Of Writer’s Block Once And For All
I don’t get writer’s block. For me, it no longer exists for one simple reason — I have worked hard to banish it.
Writer’s block used to be like insomnia for me, annoying, exhausting and coming all at once eating up a big block of my time. The insomnia I have never managed to find a decent cure for, I just power on through knowing it will pass eventually. Writer’s block never gave me this assurance though, every time it fell on me I wondered if this was it and I would never write again. I wouldn’t even sit down to write most of the time because I knew there was nothing there. Half-finished works languished as I carried on with other aspects of my life and, being the type of writer I am, once those projects were put down I could never pick them up again. I rarely finished anything longer than a short story. Novels imploded after a few chapters.
My first serious effort at novel writing was as a teenager. It was a massive opus that dragged on through university. I managed to finish it, but the time it took and the interruptions I encountered through writer’s block meant it was beyond salvage. I didn’t finish another novel for almost a decade, even with an MA in Creative Writing in the middle.
