One amazing thing about this century is that knowledge in any branch is absolutely free. Youtube will teach you everything from how to catch a fish to how to build an igloo. This works great for many subjects where, if you follow a procedure to the best of your abilities, you will get the required result. Science, technology, various DIY projects all fall under this category. As you start moving towards arts and humanities, things start getting blurry – how to sing well, how to play an instrument well or how to write well. Of course, there are many videos on these topics as well but you can never be sure if a particular strategy will work for you or not. You have to try and find out. Adapt and improvise or keep looking for what works for you.
When I started writing, I looked for inspiration in great writers. Some of them woke up early in the morning and hammered out 1000-2000 words. I tried that for a week and was miserable.
Suffice to say that I am not at my creative best in the morning. Also, staring at the blank screen does not work for me. When I start typing, I already know what I am going to write. If not, I don’t sit in front of the screen and stare.
After many trials and errors, I finally figured out what works for me. When I have a writers block, I stop doing anything about it. Instead, I read books on unfamiliar subjects like genetics, I watch videos on pilot training, I watch action movies, I binge watch TV shows. Now if the book or the movie is good, it sometimes becomes the source of the article. Even if this does not happen, this stepping back helps me in unexpected ways. After a certain amount of time, I suddenly get some idea from a song or a tweet and the writers block is gone.
This is not recommended (hence the title). A major drawback of this method is I cannot decide beforehand on the topics that I want to write. This is also not a good method for most bloggers. A cardinal rule of blogging is niche blogging. Pick an area and produce a ton of quality content which will help build your audience. Unfortunately, I am unable to do that. There are too many different things that interest me and if I restrict myself to one area, it would be too boring and the quality of the articles would go down.
This is also a major source of problem for me because there are so many interesting topics that I want to write about but I am unable to do so. A good example is the movie The Shawshank Redemption. It’s a great movie about friendship, brotherhood, and camaraderie. I love this movie to death, have seen it more than 50 times and I so badly wanted to write an article on it that I could almost taste it but every time I started, I got stuck. I could not find anything interesting to say about my most favourite movie! Finally, I got my chance when I saw the movie Wonder Woman 1984. Suddenly, I could juxtapose these two movies and find an interesting link. I don’t think the article does justice to the movie and to the genius of Stephen King but it’s better than nothing. Why does this happen? I have no idea but perhaps activating neurons in completely unrelated areas may have something to do with it.
Most people try their hand at fiction at some point. I did too. I once wrote a novel called Mind of the Machine that was about 50,000 words. Here’s how it started.
Did you like the beginning? Congrats! You have already read the best part because it all went downhill very quickly after that. It was so bad that I felt like disappearing forever in the forests.
Few years later, I read Andy Weir’s The Martian and I was speechless. It was such an amazingly well written novel!
I realized that what works for me while writing nonfiction does not work for fiction. I have to invent a new strategy for writing fiction. So I am devouring fiction writers podcasts, searching for what works for them and see if I can adapt it in some way. I also realize that my fiction reading is woefully inadequate. I need to read at least 10 times more fiction than my current rate.
There is nothing new in whatever I have said. Accomplished writers already know all this and many other secrets. As poet W. S. Merwin says, “It’s important to realize that writing is at the disposition of all sorts of forces, some of which you don’t know anything about.”
