You Call it Writer’s Block

…I call it procrastination. It means your heart isn’t in it, you haven’s sucked it up enough to do it anyway, or you actually don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing. (What, you didn’t outline? Well now, whose fault is that? Certainly we’ve all warned you about not outlining.)

All over the intertubes there are about a million pages worth of advice on how to ‘get past writer’s block.’ I don’t need to rehash any of that, mostly because I don’t believe in writer’s block. (Why? Well, Chuck Wendig said it far more succently than I feel like right now.)

So what do I do when I’m procrastinating instead of writing because I’m having trouble making words go? About a million goofy things, but the only thing I’d actually recommend is getting up and cleaning.* No, really, step away from the desk and clean the office, go do the dishes, get some laundry out of the way.

Why? Because you need to do it anyway, so it’s way better than three and a half hours of computer solitaire. You might not have the wordcount you want yet, but at least you won’t have roaches leaning over your shoulder giving advice on sentence structure. (You know what house/apartment I’m talking about. You KNOW that artist/writer friend. Weird how they’re rarely productive despite their clear lack of procrastination-cleaning. Correlation?)

It gets your blood going, and as Chuck reminds us in his post, your brain actually needs blood to function. (Not to mention the fact that as a writer, if you don’t get blood in your legs pretty regularly you risk getting blood clots AND DYING! You heard me. Clean or die.)

You probably don’t want to clean, anyway, so after a while, getting back to that writing project will be preferable to scrubbing the toilet, and before you know it, your writing a million words a minute just to avoid cleaning the garage.

Your spouse/roommate/family will be way less likely to give you a hard time about ‘getting a real job’ because you aren’t playing another round of World Craft of War and instead making their home nicer to live in.

Messes are distracting. No really, you might be used to living in a hovel. Many are, but at the end of the day most human brains get cluttered in cluttered environments. (Note: I have no scientific data on that, it just figures.)

Cleaning can (and in this context MUST) be a finite activity. If you are on a deadline and have no passion for it, now is not the time to paint the nursery and dig up all the infant clothes to put into said nursery for the upcoming baby. (Really. I can’t do that right now, no matter how much I want to.) Now is the time to say, file all the tax information on the desk, and after that, reconsider your desire to write.

While cleaning, you must be sorting through your writing project in your head. You must be thinking about it, batting it around in your head, finding what parts are preventing you from getting motivation. Like Agatha Christie told us, “the best time to plan a book is while doing the dishes.” Dull, idle tasks + thinking = ideas. It’s math. How can you argue with math? That’s right, you can’t.

Now how to stop Cleaner’s Block, that, I got nothing. Sorry.

*Please note, cleaning as a replacement for anything and everything may in fact have something to do with the fact that I am a few weeks at most away from having this baby, nesting is like that, but the advice remains solid. I think.

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