“I hated every minute of training. But I said: don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” (Muhammad Ali)

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Ehhh…

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Once upon a time…

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Pffff…

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…in a galaxy far, far away…

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…there was a man who suffered a writer’s block…

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This man wasn’t me. I`ve never suffered a writer’s block and I don’t think I ever will.

Writing starts with having something to say. The final goal of any writing is to be read. If you don’t have anything to say, what’s the point of writing about it?

Writer’s block for a writer is like a notebook with fines for a police officer. When the policeman starts his working day, he thinks: “Today I’m going to write someone a nice, big parking ticket… Let’s see… Who will it be? … Well… I can’t find anyone… Nobody seems to do anything wrong… How disappointing… I fear that I am suffering from Parking-Ticket-Writer’s Block today…” The wrong approach for this officer of the law would be to stare at his notepad until inspiration came. Every good policeman knows the solution: he has to find a criminal, he should look for trouble, he should find a problem.

The first thing you need is conflict, a problem, a plot, something you want to write about. You start with answering these three questions:

1.       What do I think about war / peace / football / eating chocolate / buying new shoes?

2.       Why do I hate/love war / peace / football / eating chocolate / buying new shoes?

3.       War / peace / football / eating chocolate / buying new shoes leads to…?

War, peace, football, eating chocolate and buying new shoes are just examples of topics. Of course, you can pick any topic you like. It’s best to write about something you know, but it’s also a challenge to pick a topic you don’t know much about and do the research that is necessary. For inspiration on choosing a topic, you can listen to music, read newspapers or magazines, take a walk and look around or read stories by other writers. Staring at a blank piece of paper is not an option.

Since Aristotle invented it, every story consists of three parts: (1) the beginning, (2) the middle and (3) the end. The beginning defines a problem, the end offers the solution and the middle part describes the actions that are necessary to go from the problem to the solution. The final conclusion might be that there is no solution, or that there is no problem, or whatever, but that’s already part of the content and not of the form. To find the content of each part, you use your answers to those three questions.

Let’s take this man with the writer’s block for an example. His name is Tarzan. He picks the topic ‘eating chocolate’, thinks about it and writes his ideas down on his notepad:

1.       I love eating chocolate

2.       I love eating chocolate because it makes me happy.

3.       Eating chocolate leads to happy thoughts.

Now Tarzan has his plot. But still he doesn’t know how to start. The answer is simple, like our best friend the police officer already knows: he should start to do his work.

Work is a difficult word. Basically ‘work’ means ‘solving problems’. When 10% of the people in a country don’t have work, there are no problems in this country. If your problem is that your car doesn’t start or you’re hungry, you should either solve it yourself or you should find someone who can solve it for you. If you decide to ask someone else, you usually pay him for his work, you give him a salary or you pay his invoice, so in return for solving your hunger/car problem, you solve (part of) his financial problems. That’s social behaviour and economy at the same time. That is how it works with work.

If we talk about writing, the ‘work’ represents the text that the writer wrote. This ‘work’ is different from the work of a gardener, a car mechanic or a baker. The writer does not get a fee for the hours he puts into the project. Most writers only receive a letter that starts with “we’re very sorry, but…” and if the writer wrote one of the 2% of the manuscripts that get published, he can only look forward to a small percentage of all the money the book-industry earns on the creativity of others. That is probably because the work of most writers doesn’t solve any problem. Most writers just write about sex and violence, about unrealistic crimes and unrealistic relationships, and their only message is: “Look at ME! I’m FABULOUS!” If you don’t solve problems, you will not get paid (unless you’re a President Whatshisname because he gets paid for creating problems). And now back to work…

We say: “The book ‘1984’ is a work of George Orwell”. Anyone with a typewriter and ten fingers can copy the entire text of the book ‘1984’ in two or three weeks, but we should realise that George Orwell had to do a lot more work to write ‘1984’. George had to plan the story, write the draft, start all over again, throw chapters away, correct and edit and check every letter in the book. George had to find people who could print and sell his book (which was not easy, because ‘1984’ was critical about communism and in those days, in 1948, communism was very popular) and before George could even start with the first sentence of the draft, he had to learn how to write, which took up all his spare time in Kindergarten and lots of energy in the years that followed, he had to do research, talk to people, read books and newspapers and magazines, and live all those experiences that gave him the ideas that we can find in ‘1984’. That’s a lot of work for one work, but ‘1984’ is a masterpiece, I read it several times and it is one of my favourite books, so thank you, George Orwell, for doing all that work.

So one day George Orwell sat down and wrote the first words of the manuscript that later became the book ‘1984’: “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…” What do you say? That was another George? George Lucas? Are you sure? As I remember well, Lucas finished his gospel first and wrote Star Wars later, but perhaps he changed his name to Orwell when he started to write ‘1984’ or there is some other kind of misunderstanding, but I’m sure that George Orwell’s first words of ‘1984’ were “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…” I know that, because at that time George Orwell didn’t want to suffer a writer’s block, and therefore he started to write “Once upon a time…”

You don’t believe me, do you? Haven’t you heard that story about that writer who suffered from writer’s block, and solved it by writing down the words ‘Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away…’, thought about it for about three months, changed the word ‘galaxy’ for ‘kingdom’, made one word of ‘farfaraway’, got so excited about it that he cried out: “Shhh… Heck!”, corrected that into ‘Shrek’ and finished the story? It became a hit in Hollywood with two sequels and a million dollar merchandising industry.

So now we can go back to Tarzan, to George of the Jungle. Tarzan had his plot, his idea that eating chocolate leads to happy thoughts, and he felt that he should share this important information with all the unhappy people in this world, to make their life a little better. But Tarzan was still staring at that blank page in his typewriter. He didn’t know how to start. Tarzan remembered the important lesson 1984 of George Orwell and wrote: “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away… there was a man who was sad. He took a bite of chocolate, chewed, swallowed and noticed that he felt happy. He was surprised and decided to try it again. He thought of his tax declaration: his face turned green, he clinched his fists, and he got angry. Then he took another bite of chocolate and the miracle happened again: the dark clouds of his thoughts disappeared and he felt happy…”

Tarzan felt excited. After a fantastic start like this, it could only become better. He took the paper out of his typewriter and read what he had written. “That part about the dark clouds of his thoughts, I really like that. The idea of the tax declaration is also good: it adds intense horror to the story. I think it’s better to change ‘a man who was sad’ into ‘a sad man’. Perhaps I should work a little on that part where his face turns green. And it might also be a good idea if I give this man a name and a little bit of character, to make him a more likeable for my readers…”, he thought. Now Tarzan was writing. His writer’s block was forgotten. Tarzan just had to DO something.

Of course, this first line ‘Once upon a time’ will not make it to the final version. It’s just a tool, something that helps us to start, like the run-up every athlete will make to jump higher or further. We only have to realise that writing is nothing but work, hit keys on your typewriter so they leave a mark on the paper, produce words. When you have the first version, you can do the rest of the work, like research, character development, creating the environment, planning the story, rewriting the draft, editing and fine tuning.

One more example, just to make sure. Here’s your problem: you need money. There are so many solutions for this problem that it might be difficult to start. When you try to start with the question “How do I get money?”, it has so much space that you’ll get lost. Limit your options. It’s better to start like this: “I need money and I will get it by robbing a bank. Not just any bank, but the ABC-bank at the corner of my street.” Now you have a story. Now you can start to investigate, open an account there to see where the cameras are, how many security, how to enter in the vault, perhaps someone behind the counter has a crush on you or you can take the job to clean the building before the clients enter or… You have to get a start, so just pick one and see where it ends. The worst thing that can happen is that you spent hours, days, weeks on research to find out that robbing the ABC-bank at the corner is not an option. So you pick another option, counterfeit the winning ticket of the lottery and cash it, and you start again. You have to do the work. And work, my dear reader, is a short synonym for ‘solving problems’.

Hemingway told us that sometimes he wrote the same scene 40 times before he was satisfied with it. My opinion about that is: “If you want to be an earnest writer, Ernest, you better do it well the first time, or you’ll never win the Nobel Prize.”, but Hemingway won the Nobel and I didn’t, so Hemingway is right. You can learn from Hemingway that good texts don’t come falling out of the sky: you have to work for it.

What does that mean, “work for it”? When I walk the dog or wash the dishes, I think about my novel. When I have to wait for the bus, I think about my novel. When I can’t sleep at night, I think about my novel. When I hear a nice dialogue in a movie or a beautiful phrase in the lyric of a song, when I read a nice line in a book or newspaper, I think about my novel. That’s how ideas come up, ready to write down and use when it’s time to write. I don’t start to write until I have ideas about what I want to write. That’s why I never have a writer’s block, 100% guaranteed.

Writing is translating emotions and information into words so that any reader can understand it. Producing letters on a piece of paper, we call ‘typing’. Producing great texts and damn good stories, we call ‘writing’. The difference is the thinking and the experience you put into it. Experience you can buy everywhere. It costs energy, time, sweat and suffering. You can also pay for it with mistakes. Thinking is something you can learn. It starts with asking questions, like ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ and you’ll never know where it ends. The only way a writer can fail is by not trying.

The conclusion is that any writer’s block disappears when you have something to say, at the moment when you start to think about how to say it. So now we have our start, our middle part and this here is the end. Aristotle can be proud. George Orwell can be satisfied. Tarzan takes another bite of chocolate and is happy too. Even I’m happy. And with a happy ending like this, we can only conclude that this story is a masterpiece.

And if you can do it better: feel free to do so.