Writer's Block Busters

Give me five! Now give me seven. One more five.By Zach Hively

Readers often ask me how I manage to write something new every week. The answer is simple: I live in terror.

(Terror of what? Of being a letdown, not following through, discovering that no one actually cares when I skip a week? Hey, give us a break. We here at this fine publication haven’t dug that deep. There’s no time for digging into our core selves when we’re always on deadline.)

But fear is not always a sustainable motivator.So, sometimes, I turn to what we entertainment professionals call an “encore performance” because it sounds both more entertaining and more professional than “rerun.”

I will, when the straits get dire, republish something that originally ran in a simpler time—a time like, for instance, last year. When I do, I end up wondering how in the world I was ever so young, so carefree, so legally free, and so clearly without a proofreader.

These insights are, however, not helpful insights for readers. Readers who ask me how I manage to write something new every week often want some sort of reassurance that I am on medical-grade stimulants and can hook them up.

Sadly, all I have to hook them up with is some actionable advice.

I’m going to let you in on my little secrets. Two very simple things I do in order to keep myself writing that you can do too, probably:

1. Stop writing altogether. I put down the pen and the laptop and take a walk with the dogs. Around the time I forget to feel guilty for not writing, an idea will land on me, much like a good-luck dragonfly. If I am very fortunate, a second idea will land atop the first idea and curl its tail and mate with the first idea to make, one hopes, a whole new generation of ideas. (This has really happened to me—at least as often with dragonflies as with ideas.)
2. When that doesn’t work, write a haiku.

Anyone—and I include my dogs in this—can write seventeen syllables. There exist in the hallowed halls of poetics some pedants who disagree about what variants we can call a haiku. But yours truly is a purist. I stick with ye olde 5-7-5 formula that may or may not include an allusion to Mount Fuji.

Riding-or-dying with the classic style provides me with the basics of a little game: I don’t have to think up what I want to write out of everything in the whole wide universe—no, I just have to write one measly five-syllable thought. I might write something such as:

I’m sure I can write.

Ha ha! Suck it, writer’s block—you can’t stop me from writing five syllables! They can sneak through any crack in my psyche, anywhere, anytime, and I’m off to the races with whatever else I need to write that week.

At least, I might be. I also tend to show some compulsive tendencies, and I really must finish something once I’ve begun, so long as it is:

• more fun than my other options;
• short;
• and no one is telling me I have to do it.

​Haiku hits them all. So, I typically decide I really should finish this tiny warmup exercise of a poem. I try out some contenders for that seven-syllable second, or “encore,” line, counting beats on my fingers.

It can’t be as hard as it--
It’s just pen on paper, you--
No pressure. No one will read--

​Dang. You give me more than five simple syllables and I start to run on. Rein it in, yo. How about:

How hard can it be, really?

​REALLY HARD! my harsh inner critic yells at me. GIVE UP! my harsh inner financial advisor bellows. But I’m so close, so very close, to wrapping up this anti-writer’s-block haiku. It’s time to bring it on home--

I’m sure I can write
How hard can it be, really?
Hard as Mount Fuji

The point, clearly, is not the quality of the resulting haiku. The point is simply to generate something, anything, that did not exist before I started. It clears the way for more, and hopefully better, thoughts to come through.
​
Once I’ve given the finger to writer’s block by having—whaddya know—written something, either I’m off to grab my notebook to scribble out more good ideas than two horny dragonflies can produce … or I’m off to give the dogs an encore walk.