Writer Wednesday - Writer's Block

The whole notion of "Writer's Block" is of endless interest to non-writers. In movies about writers, there will inevitably be a scene where the main character sits hunched at his or her desk, their head bowed in defeat before a blank page or Word document.In reality, writer's block rarely works that way. Most writers have no particular trouble deciding what to write next (I often have too many ideas to work on at any one time!), nor is it difficult to fill your writing time doing something to your current work in progress, even if it doesn't end up being particularly fruitful. No, the real 'block' you have to look out for is when you start a new project, forge ahead for 10,000 words or so, and then stall.This happens more regularly than most people think. Often you'll hear that an author's debut is the 'first book they ever wrote', but in reality, the first book an author publishes is rarely the first one they write. This is equally true of their second, third, fourth books, and so on. Very likely, there will have been a good few false starts getting from one book to the next. Knowing when to cut your losses and start a new project is important if you don't want to waste months of your time on something that won't go anywhere. At the same time, of course, you also can't discard a partially-finished manuscript every time your progress begins to slow.Complicated, right?One of my most recent projects has stalled on me, which is why there's only one work in progress under my wordcount monitor in the right-hand sidebar of this site. After a few weeks of spinning my wheels, I decided that that particular idea wasn't going to take flight. Disappointing, but not anything to get too upset over; there'll always be other books, after all. The important thing is to keep going. I'm still working on the urban fantasy novel (and making very good progress on it!), and there are plenty of blog posts I want to write over the next few weeks.That, I think, is the key to beating this particular form of "writer's block". Keep writing (even if it's not exactly what you'd like to be writing), keep reading, keep an open mind, and wait for a new idea to come to you. It might just be even better than the one that didn't work.