One of the most frequent questions I’m asked as an author is about writer’s block. What do you do about it? How do you overcome it?
My usual response is to say that I have a short, unhelpful answer and a longer, more helpful one.
The short, unhelpful answer is: I don’t get writer’s block.
But the truer, more complicated answer is that, yes, sometimes I absolutely struggle with getting the words down, but rarely do I face the abject paralysis of the blank page. That’s because I’ve been writing seriously for so long now—over two decades!—that I’ve learned and developed a ton of tools, techniques, and exercises to deploy whenever I’m not sure how to proceed.
Some of these tools are craft-based, like one of my favorite writing exercises, “Ten Things.” (I can’t for the life of me remember where I picked this one up, but I use it all the time.) In it, I take a question or a problem I’m facing with my manuscript, and I write down ten possible answers (although it could also be seven or fifteen or twenty or however many I need). Often, the first two or three ideas will be the most obvious and least interesting, but that’s to be expected. Part of the exercise is to get through the most obvious ideas so I can quickly discard them. Then the last two or three ideas will usually be outlandishly unusable, which is good too, because they contort the imagination into curious new shapes. But it’s the middle three or four ideas that end up hitting that sweet spot between obvious and outlandish. They tend to be more unusual, more intriguing, more nuanced, more revealing, and they’ll usually open up paths through the story that tell me something new about my character(s), plot, or theme.
Some writing blocks aren’t technical, however. Some are emotional, and for me those require a different type of tool.
Sometimes I make more art. Sometimes I burn my insecurities. Sometimes I journal.
I’ve kept journals for over twenty years, not as a daily practice but as a tool for writing and, sometimes, processing my life. I use a journal to jot down ideas, plan scenes, brainstorm, record quotes I like from books I’m reading, go over things I’m dealing with, take notes during interviews and phone calls, and generally dump everything I don’t want to hold in my head.
Sometimes, as part of this practice, I’ll also do what Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, calls “affirmations.”
A caveat: I’ve never made it all the way through The Artist’s Way, a collection of twelve weeks of prompts, exercises, and practices to nurture one’s creativity, but that doesn’t stop me from recommending it or using its tools, like the following from Week 1 on “Affirmative Weapons.”
In this three-step exercise, Cameron first encourages artists to write down an affirming statement (like, I am a brilliant writer), then list any negative, knee-jerk beliefs—which she calls “blurts”—that arise in protest (like, I am a fraud). Finally, she suggests that artists take those negative beliefs and flip each of them on their head to transform them into affirmations. For example, the negative belief, I am untalented and phony, could become the affirmation, I am genuinely talented.
What I love about this exercise is that it’s so simple, flexible, and easy to deploy. Being an avid journaler, I don’t usually have to go through the first step of testing out affirming statements to see what my “blurts” are. I just start writing about what I’m feeling, and my negative emotions and beliefs unspool in front of me: why I’m struggling, what I’m scared of, why I’m uncertain or anxious or riddled with doubt.
For a brief example, and a tour through my journal, please allow me to take you back to 2019. It was a strange year for me. If you remember last month’s newsletter, I had a lot of conflicting feelings about the 2018 launch of The Storyteller, the last book in The Reader Trilogy, and a year after its release, I was still feeling insecure. In December 2019, I was revising We Are Not Free, a work of historical fiction entirely unlike anything I’d written before, and drafting a new project, A Thousand Steps into Night, a rollicking folktale road trip through a Ghibli-esque world filled with demons and spirits, which I’d pitched to my editor as my “jubilant return to fantasy.”
But I was feeling anything but jubilant. Here’s an excerpt from my journal, dated December 17:
I think one of the main reasons I am so hung up about 1000 STEPS is that I have such fear about it. How much people will dislike/like/love/not follow/follow me there. Whether it will flop. If I can only write extraordinarily personal realistic fiction and have that be well received. If I can do this. If anyone will care.
It doesn’t seem to matter that my books are still finding readers. That some people adore them or are inspired by them. For some reason, these things don’t stick.
Instead what sticks are the fears and the doubts... But I don’t think I can write this way. I don’t think I will do my best work this way. I don’t think this emotional baggage or mindset is healthy or productive.
These are my blurts, my negative beliefs. I knew they were blocking me, but I couldn’t get over them. And I hated that. And, like the time I could feel my doubts around querying destroying my creative energy, I felt that spark of defiance rise up in me. I didn’t want to feel this way. I shouldn’t have to feel this way! I knew I needed a positive force to combat my negative beliefs, so I turned to Julia Cameron. Here is what I want, I wrote:
I will be unafraid.
I will be bold.
I will be stupid and ambitious.
I will write with joy.
Did I believe these things about myself? Not really. But I didn’t have to. Not yet. Because as my high school choir teacher, Mr. Brown, used to tell us, Fake it ‘til you make it.
After that, I started every work session by writing down these same four affirmations, again and again, every time I sat down to write. I will be unafraid. I will be bold. I will be stupid and ambitious. I will write with joy. I took them with me through the holidays and into the new year, when on January 2, 2020, I wrote:
I’ve decided to change one of my affirmations. I think it’s okay to be afraid—I think it’s normal, and to try to stifle that feeling could be fruitless, or a lot of effort for something that might not be able to be done. Instead, I think it might be better to somehow try to sit with that feeling, to acknowledge it or exist with it in some way, but not have it interfere. To do the thing anyway. To do it scared, but not to let the fear control it.
Thereafter, my affirmations became:
I will be brave.
I will be bold.
I will be stupid and ambitious.
I will write with joy and reckless abandon.
And I continued writing down these affirmations, every work session, until I believed them, until I internalized them, until I was bold and brave and stupid and ambitious, until I did write with joy and reckless abandon. (Thanks, Mr. Brown. I faked it ‘til I made it!)
I was describing this process to a friend, who’s a licensed therapist, and I asked her if there’s a more technical term for this than “affirmations,” and she said it sounded like “reframing” or “cognitive reframing,” a way to change one’s thought patterns. A bit of internet sleuthing took me to PositivePsychology.com, where in “Cognitive Restructuring Techniques for Reframing Thoughts,” Courtney E. Ackerman M.A. talks about the use of behavioral experiments that involve testing negative beliefs and creating alternate ones, or “thought records” that describe potentially harmful or false assumptions before generating “alternate thoughts” that are more positive and realistic than the original assumption. The techniques are much more clinical and formalized than Cameron’s “blurts” and “affirmations,” but I think it’s neat to see the same basic principles at work.
Here's another way to look at it: Recently, I was talking to my friend and fellow author
(The Echo Room, Strange Exit) about the struggles I’ve been having with my current project and the affirmations I’ve been using to work through them, and she told me about this video she’d seen on social media. In it, a person has a piece of clay, and in the clay is a deep trough representing a “blurt” or negative belief or a story you tell yourself about the way things are. Then, the person in the video describes how if you pour water over the piece of clay, the water will always go down the same old trough, reinforcing that same old negative thinking. But if you carve another channel, the water might not always go down that first trough anymore. It might go down the new one instead. Maybe you’re using an affirmation. Maybe you’re telling yourself a new story. And if you carve another channel, the water might go down that one. Or another one. Or another one. Sometimes, Parker said, you don’t need to erase the original trough to change your thinking. Sometimes you just need to carve another channel.When put like that, my love and use of affirmations begins to make a whole lot of sense to me, because I tell stories all the time. Maybe, like We Are Not Free, they’re stories that urge us to remember the past so we can change the future. Maybe, like A Thousand Steps into Night, they’re stories that celebrate coalitions and cooperation over hierarchies of violence and oppression. Maybe, like my daily affirmations, they’re smaller stories that simply say, I am brave, when I am feeling scared. I’m a storyteller. When I want to change something, I tell a new story. I carve a new channel. And, sometimes, that’s how change is made.
In case you missed it
Kindling is one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of the 21st Century (So Far)! Thank you so much to Kirkus for including Kindling on this list of truly incredible, game-changing YA titles. What an honor!
I’ll be at the LA Times Book Festival the weekend of April 26-27, so if you’re in the area, please do come see me on a panel at the YA Stage on Saturday, April 26 at 11:20 a.m. for “High Intensity, Even Higher States: Sci-Fi and Fantasy in Young Adult Fiction” with Brittany N. Williams, Ransom Riggs, and Victoria Aveyard, moderated by Sharon Levin. A book signing will follow the panel, so feel free to say hi!
I’m speaking at the 50th Summer Children’s Literature Institute at Simmons University in Boston this July! This year’s event features a stunning lineup of authors and illustrators reflecting on the question, “Are We There Yet?” and I am so excited to hear their thoughts on where children’s literature has been and where it’s going. I’ll be speaking on Sunday, July 27 at 2:30pm, with a book signing to follow, so I hope to see you there!
What I’m into these days
Always more poetry. I’m reading National Book Award winner Something about Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha with my friend and fellow author Tara Sim (We Shall Be Monsters, The City of Dusk)—recently, “Dialogic” and “Threads” have struck me hard.
I’m still reading science fiction, starting with Alone Out Here by Riley Redgate, a sort of Lord of the Flies in space when a bunch of kids fleeing a ravaged Earth are suddenly set adrift on a generation ship bound for the nearest inhabitable planet and have to figure out how not to repeat the mistakes of the generations that came before. My friend and fellow author Emily Skrutskie (The Salvation Gambit, A Legionnaire’s Guide to Love and Peace) recently recommended I check out Arboreality by Rebecca Campbell, a slim volume describing the effects of the apocalypse on Vancouver Island. It reminds me of one of my favorite books, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and I absolutely love it.
I’ve been in the mood for puzzles lately. I’m trying to complete the last daily challenges of A Little to the Left on iOS, a cute little game where you have to organize and arrange household items in aesthetically pleasing ways. I tore through Chants of Sennaar, a point-and-click puzzle game where you reconstruct the languages of different civilizations in order to advance to the top of a Babel-esque tower. In The Roottrees Are Dead, you play as an expert internet sleuther and genealogist trying to track down the various heirs of a recently deceased candy mogul by typing search terms into a faux internet browser and filling out a corkboard-sized family tree. It’s a game perfectly designed for me and my tendency to fall down Wikipedia-sized rabbit holes. Highly recommend!