A Tip for Fiction Writers

 

There are days where you can barely get up, much less write something. What should you do on such a day? Your mind is filled with ideas, waiting to be expressed, but your body shuts down. Eventually, you give in to the temptation and go back to sleep. But when you sleep, your ideas haunt your dreams urging you to let them out. So, you wake up and take your pen but the ideas will not come out and you lack the motivation to force them out.

The greatest enemy of the author is not a critic but writing slump.

I have been an unfortunate victim of writing slump multiple times. On the bright side, however, I have learnt how to battle it out. Here are a few steps which would help you to get over your writing slump.

1.    Listen to good music for a few minutes. As you listen to it, mull over the scene where you stopped writing. Imagine in it and enact it in your head. Music sets the mood and helps you to picture the scene quite easily. This would, more or less, give you an idea of how you are going to continue the story.

2.    Whatever you have imagined write it down. It need not be a complete picture. It could be some broken pieces of dialogue or descriptions. Sometimes it would just be nonsense but nevertheless, write it down. You are bringing your vague idea to the paper.

3.    After writing, step back and relax. Do not read what you have written for the next few hours. The best tip I can offer is this: Don’t read what you have written as soon as you finish it. Let it stew for some time. Writers tend to dislike what they write therefore, to avoid a biased judgement, take some time off.

4.    Once your mind is refreshed, take a look at what you have written. Now you would have the ‘eye of a stranger’ which helps you to read with disinterest. This would help you to objectively decide where you need to work on.

5.    Now try to arrange the broken parts that you wrote. You may have to change the order of the dialogue. Sometimes you may end up changing the sentence and other times you may scrap out a few lines. This is completely fine.

By the end of this process, you would have written at least a small scene. Writing is therapeutic but it is a process that requires patience. Your work brings you great joy and so it is important to put a lot of care into it’s creation. There is no need to rush. Write at your own pace and while you write, you learn.