Don’t Know What to Write? You’re Not Alone

Lately I’ve seen a lot of people online asking about how to start writing. In my opinion this is a struggle that all writers face at times, no matter the experience. We can all have writer’s block, even if we have ideas, or know exactly what we want to write about. Writing when there’s a blank page can feel uncertain. I’ve had times where I was just staring at a page in Scrivener that had nothing on it, with a word count reading zero out of three thousand words. I’ve even had this when I had a bullet point layout of the scenes for the particular chapter I was writing.

As I’ve reflected on this, I feel like there are multiple reasons that can be the root cause. My most common one is that I can feel like the scene I’m about to write will take a lot of work. I shoot for ninety thousand words for my book, and sometimes that can feel like a lot. Other times I can feel unsure about some of the details that are involved, like how I should convey a character’s feelings for example. Another thing I see get in my way is thinking too far ahead while writing a draft. It can be easy to think of who’s going to be reading it before you’ve even written it. Here are a few things that I do to help myself when I am struggling to put my ideas and concepts on paper.

Relax

The first thing I do is try to relax. It doesn’t help to think of the future with your writing unless you are pondering good things that could happen. Thinking about how the world will react to what you’ve written only makes it harder. One of my favorite author quotes comes from Elena Ferrante, who is known for saying that “Books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.” And it’s true, books can stand on their own once written. She also is known for saying how she felt better once she thought about her words being released from her.

Another thing to remember is that drafts are just that, drafts. It can’t be seen by the world until you release it. You get to decide if you just want friends and family to see it, or if you want to put it out in the world. If you can take this kind of pressure off of yourself it makes it much easier to write.

Start Small

When I first started writing I actually just wrote up characters. I had a few friends online where we would make up characters, then put them in a story where they would interact with each other. There weren’t many guidelines, and it never turned into a full story. From there I went on to write short stories (somewhere between 300-500 words.) My longest short story got to 30,000 words, and was an attempt at writing a novel. That was many years ago, and while it was not very good it helped me learn some about the process of writing a story. When I was writing Dream Sparks I didn’t have a full idea of the plot until around chapter eleven. A lot of times I write as I go, and even go back and add things in later. Even setting a goal of ten words for the day is still progress, and often times you may find yourself writing more than that. It’s also fine to go back and change things later. I like to tell myself that drafts are not written in stone!

Find What Inspires You

Some authors are inspired by movies or art. I personally am inspired by music and drawings of characters. Enya’s music inspires me a lot with my writing. We all can be inspired by the world around us, we just have to figure out what it is exactly that inspires us. Once you have this it can be a good tool to help you write on days that you feel stuck, or don’t feel like writing. Writing something that is fun to you, or you feel inspired to write is the easiest to work with in my opinion.

Hopefully this will help you to start writing!