Lisa Chow keeps writing “blah blah blah” until something better comes up.  ”It always does,” she says.

For more advice on beating writer’s block, please see this article and this one.

A lot of authors (especially me) sit down to type out a story but get distracted by websites a few minutes later.  The conventional solution is  writing with paper-and-pen.  But what if your writing could genuinely benefit from computer access (because of saved drafts, online references and such)?  Try RescueTime, a free program that you can use to block access to distracting websites for a certain amount of time.  For example, if you’ve decided to commit yourself to an hour of writing, do you really need Facebook or email or ESPN or LolCats during that time?  Probably not.  In addition, RescueTime allows you to make the block undoable.  If you decide to check out some LolCats during your hour of writing, too bad!  You’re already locked in for the hour.  Clearly they made this program with me in mind. 

If you’re participating in National Novel Writing Month, here are some tips you might find helpful. 

1.  Don’t ever tell yourself “that isn’t good enough.”  You’re only writing a draft.  It doesn’t need to be perfect, or even readable– it’s just a draft!  Forget “that isn’t good enough.”  Let “save it for rewrite” be your mantra. 

2.  Don’t get hung up on research.  In fact, I’d recommend against doing any research during the first draft of most fiction.  (If you’re writing historical fiction for publication, that’s definitely an exception). 

3.  Remove any distractions from your writing space.  If you find that the computer itself is a distraction, try writing by hand. 

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For Part 1, please go here.

1. Don’t stop to rewrite chapters until you’ve finished a rough draft of every chapter. Your first draft won’t be great—it definitely won’t be publishable—and that’s okay. At the time you’re first writing a particular chapter, it’s virtually impossible to make it publishably good because you won’t know the endpoint you’re building towards until you’ve gotten there. While an outline can help solve this problem by providing a map, outlines generally change quite a bit as the author actually writes the chapters—characters develop in unforeseen directions, plots are added or removed, characters may be added or removed, etc. It’s much easier to go back and make chapter 5 excellent after you’ve finished the first draft of the entire manuscript.

2. The most important thing is to keep writing. It’s okay if it’s not coherent or stylish—you can always fix that by rewriting later. Don’t worry about whether it’s good or publishable. At this point, it won’t be.

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Here are a few tricks to help you keep writing after you get stuck.

1. Switch problems. Writer’s block often sets after a hero has resolved a problem and it’s not clear where the story is headed.  Are there any problems left?  Could you introduce a new problem?
2. Add a complication. Last chapter, it may have looked like the hero’s solution worked perfectly.  Well, that was last chapter.  What went wrong?
3. Switch solutions. Have your hero try to look at his problems in a new way.  Maybe he has to use ingenuity instead of brute force, or diplomacy instead of coercion, or careful planning rather than impulsiveness.  (Or vice versa).  For example, Heroes takes away the characters’ powers from from time to time.
4. Switch scenes. “Meanwhile, thousands of miles away…”  Moving the story very far will probably feel disjointed at first, but you can add a smoother transition after you determine where the story is going.
5. Look at an important character in a new way. Perhaps there’s some aspect to your hero that could be developed more.
6. Give up on perfectionism. If you’re worried about being perfect, it will be very hard for you to start writing.  Don’t set ridiculously high standards for yourself on the first draft.  No one writes rough drafts that are good enough to publish.  It is much easier to write a few pages a day– even if they aren’t any good– and later rewrite them into something publishable.
7. If you’re truly desperate, consider throwing in a new antagonist or obstacle. This may reduce plot coherence, but the most important thing is to keep writing.  You can smooth out the connections later.
8. If the plot has totally stalled, consider switching your angle. Sometimes, writers pick an angle because it’s conventional.  “I want to write about a magical university, so my story will be about a young wizard who studies there and eventually saves the world from great evil.”  Harry Potter used that focus quite well, but it’s not the only possibility.  What if you told a story about the teachers?  Or campus security? Or the admissions office?  Or the Ministry of Magic?  Or the bad guys?  Or the broom-flying instructors?  Or the headmaster?  Your story almost certainly has many such possibilities.  At the very least, any of these perspectives could add another chapter to help you develop your main character in a different direction.

Did you find this article helpful? If so, please check out How to Beat Writer’s Block, Part 2. Thanks!

Expecting perfection from the first draft will probably paralyze you. On the first draft, the most important thing is to write something and then you can turn it into a coherent, clean masterpiece later. When you’re writing the first draft, it may help to think of your job as giving your internal self-editor material to work with rather than writing a story fit for public consumption.

Here are a few suggestions to avoid perfectionist impulses during the first draft…

1) Don’t edit.

2) If you get stuck on what happens in one part of the story, summarize it in a few sentences and move on. You can fill it in later.

3) Commit yourself to writing for at least 30 or 45 minutes. After ten minutes of accomplishing little, you will hopefully start to feel frustrated and lower your expectations. “Maybe this line is good enough.”