Breaking Through The Writing Wall

by Lynette Eason @LynetteEason

Recently, I had something happen that I’ve never experienced before. I hit a wall. A writing wall. I had the story in my head, I had part of it on paper and yet, I couldn’t seem to sit down and just finish the thing. Which was really bad because I had a deadline looming.

I have to admit that after almost 40 books, this experience was rather unnerving. I mean I would open the manuscript and just stare at the words I’d written. However, I wasn’t quite ready to panic yet. I was actually rather intrigued. I’d heard about writers’ block, of course, and while sometimes I’ve had to sit and think before putting my hands on the keyboard, I’d never actually been “stuck” to the point where I just couldn’t figure out which words to type. So what’s a writer to do when that happens?

Here are a few things I’ve done to get the words flowing again.

1. Pray about it. Here’s kind of how my prayer went. God, I love you. I know you love me. To be honest, I’m not really feeling it because while you gave me this story to write, the words aren’t coming. So…could you please give them to me? Sometimes He does, sometimes not.

2. Go do something else. If God doesn’t lay the words out for you right away, it could be that you just need to do something else. Yes, even on a deadline, stop the story and go to something else. Like work on the next story you have in the line-up. Or go watch a movie. Or read a book!

3. Set a tiny goal. Come back to the story that’s due and tell yourself you’re going to write just fifty words on it. And even if those fifty words are awful, at least you can fix awful. You can’t fix blank.

4. Stream of consciousness writing. Just write about what could happen. Do you need to introduce a new character? Does a character need to die? What is something that could happen that your reader would never expect—mostly because you didn’t expect it either. I mean, seriously, you could just be writing words and more words hoping that something will make sense. And then your heroine’s best friend ends up dead in the bathtub! WHAT??? But that’s another story altogether…(yes, that happened to me in Don’t Look Back.)

5. Exercise. WAIT! Don’t hit me…but yeah. It works. It gets the blood pumping and sometimes that blood seems to carry an idea or two to the brain. Try it. And besides, it’s good for you. And if you do that, you don’t have to feel guilty eating chocolate later.

6. Write first thing in the morning. Like early. I don’t know why that’s my best writing time, but it is. When I get up, if I’ll jump right on the story, I’ll get some of my best words of the day in. And if I wake up at 3:30AM (like I did two mornings ago) I don’t lie there and toss and turn, I simply get up and start writing. Even if I couldn’t think of a thing to write two hours before I went to bed. For some reason, the words decided to come at 3:30. I wrote over a thousand words before I started getting sleepy again. I went back to sleep around 5:30 and slept until 8:00 so lack of sleep didn’t ruin my whole day and I already had most of my word count done.

So, there you have it. Six ideas to knock through that writing wall. Don’t get discouraged, don’t get frustrated, just keep writing. What about you? What do you do when you feel like you’ve got writer’s block? Any great tips for getting past it?

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Lynette Eason is the award-winning, bestselling author of almost forty books. She writes for Revell and Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense line. Her books have finaled or won awards in contests such as The Maggies, Inspirational Readers Choice Award, The Carol, ECPA Book of the Year, and The Selah. She is also the 2016 Daphne du Maurier Award winner in the Inspirational Romantic Mystery/Suspense category and Overall Daphne Winner this year. Her most recent achievement is placing in the top 10 out of thousands of entries in the James Patterson co-writing competition. Lynette and her husband Jack live in upstate South Carolina with their two teenagers. Lynette can often be found online at www.facebook.com/lynette.eason , @lynetteeason (Twitter) , and www.lynetteeason.com.