Sharleen Jonsson

When writers get together and talk about writer’s block, suggestions for remedies are almost endless. In fact, for people claiming to suffer from a creativity deficit, it’s amazing how many ideas writers contemplating writer’s block can come up with. There are wholesome routes to more words—working out, long walks, listening to music, maybe playing with the dog/cat. Reading someone else’s great writing can work. These are all what I call WB 101 strategies. When these fail, try WB 102 tactics–hands-on research.

There’s basic research, such as reading about the topic you’re writing about and interviewing experts in the field. But there’s also another—easier—kind of research writers often don’t think of, and it’s what I call Walk on the Beach.

Awhile back, I was drafting a story and got to a scene where two main characters meet at a beach, a beach I have been to about a thousand times, and they have a conversation that (hopefully) moves the plot forward. One character is concealing information from the other, and during their conversation, the other’s suspicions are aroused. The problem was, the whole scene—no matter how much I worked at it—was dull, dull, dull.

In terms of physical action, my characters were doing little. In fact, they weren’t doing much more than sitting on a log. I tweaked. One character picked up a stone and threw it into the water. Yawn. The other commented on a passerby. Yawn. The scene could as easily have taken place in a parked car.

So, I went to the beach.

And when I actually went to this beach I’d been to a thousand times before, I meandered along listening to the surf, smelling the salty air—and then I slid and fell. This beach is not flat, and in places walking along it is like traversing the side of a steep hill, and I saw, in a flash, my characters strolling side by side and then one sliding into the other, a collision that resulted in the thing one character wanted to conceal literally falling into the open. And that may not sound like much, but that one idea led to almost a thousand new words.  Now we, my characters and I, were getting somewhere.

It won’t always be the case that your characters are frolicking (or not) on a beach/street/park that happens, in real life, to be a five-minute drive from your home. But if they are, for example, stir-frying shrimp, you, too, can haul out the wok. You may have cooked the recipe a thousand times before, but now you’re doing it through the eyes of your character(s). Your fictional cook may just come up with something new to feed your story.

If this doesn’t cure your writer’s block, at least you’ve got yourself some exercise, and maybe a shrimp stir-fry to enjoy.