Set a Timer

I resisted this technique for a long time. Timers are noisy things; I don’t like ’em.

But a deadline is divine. I seriously doubt much of anything has ever been done without one. Not to mention that it’s extremely useful to learn that it is possible to do something with a very small increment of time.

Short, concentrated sessions are key. The next time you’re stuck, set a timer. Make it a very short session—no more than 15 minutes. You can reset as many times as you want, but for this to really work, you must give yourself permission to stop when the timer goes off.

The only rule, really, is to do nothing during the set time except that which you are pledged to do. You might, for instance, use the time to make a list.

Make a List

Everyone can make a list. You don’t need anything fancy, no special software or planner inserts. Just an old envelope and something to make marks on it. Or, if you must work on a keyboard, an open document....

Start with the mundane, the brain clutter:

1. bank deposit at lunchtime
2. take dog to vet
3. finish writing copy for Hit Those Keys

Move on to something a little more interesting, perhaps a character’s list of his or her mundane items:

1. feed and water heiress
2. clip relevant items from today’s paper
3. compose ransom note

Maybe you don’t have a character yet. Perhaps you’re still searching for the right combination of situation or setting to start developing a new story.

1. list all the teachers whom you have reason to remember
2. list the collections you keep now or kept as a child
3. list what you would say to a talk show host on his or her program
4. list all the reasons why none of these list suggestions will work for you
5. list at least five topics for lists that you think would be worthwhile
6. make a list of the lists you find out in the world, both real and virtual. For instance, there are many lists on this site, including this one.

Mix & Match

Brainstorm. This word gets used often, but just what does a person do to get their brain to storm? Where do ideas come from?

Everywhere and nowhere. All around you and only from inside you.

Our minds have a handy habit of disdaining lonely, unattached fragments of information. Sometimes all you need to do is juxtapose two wildly unrelated bits and then see what kind of connection your mind forms between them. You can give this process a nudge by intentionally sitting down with some random input (where’s that list you made yesterday?), stipulate a time limit (set a timer, say 15 minutes?) and/or a length requirement (at least five sentences?) and GO.

Here’s an example, if you need one... The words were chosen randomly from the dictionary: crucible, bowl, Briton, gay, plummet, fairyland, nationality, roughen, oxbow, pullet.

I was the first person in our high school he told: “I’m gay.” I don’t know what I expected when Phil sat me down on the grass and then stared at his shoes, but this wasn’t it. What I knew then about gayness could fit in a fingerbowl. At least I knew enough to know that this conversation was a crucible and what we were refining was courage (his) and forbearance (mine). Still, my confidence plummeted; what could I say? I was a pullet waiting for a skillet. “How do you—um—KNOW?” was the best I came up with. “There was this Briton....” he told me, shyly. That confused me since gayness was enough of a topic without bringing in subtleties of nationality. The whole conversation became like an oxbow lake, cut off from the flow of its beginnings. I mentioned how once I had ridden through the lowlands of Scotland in a dense fog. “It was almost like fairyland,” I prattled, and then clapped my hand over my mouth. What had I SAID?

(1 paragraph, 15 minutes,
9 out of 10 random words used)

“Pick a Bird”

Pick a bird. This expression from Anne Lamott’s priceless writer’s guide (the one writer’s manual you must take with you to a desert island) helps me remember the hardest and most basic thing:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. [It] was due the next day....he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. ...My father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

—Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

You don’t write books, or screenplays, or even chapters or acts. You write words and sentences, passages and moments. All you have to write today is what you can see in the work at hand. Pick a bird. Give it your full attention. Show us.

Try Telescoping

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

—Eliel Saarinen,
quoted by his son Eero,
in Time magazine, June 2, 1977

You focused tightly to write your ‘bird.’ Now pull back and look at the branch, the tree, the yard, the house, the neighborhood, the city....

Pull back as far as you need to see the entire context of the passage you worked on yesterday. What came before? What carried through the bit you wrote? What stretches beyond?

You will probably see more to do in your narrative than you know how to do right this minute. Make notes to help you remember what those things are. Then focus the telescope and zoom in on a new bird.

Dress Up or Down

Some days, your words don’t seem able to summon much spark. They mope around, “like jellyfish with the misery.”

Well, give them a treat. Dress those words up, or down. Take them out on the town, or take them slumming.

By that I mean alter your level of diction—word choice and tone—so that it’s completely unlike whatever genre of work you’re attempting.

Do you have a monosyllabic, tough-talking, film-noir sort of narrator? Make him write the purplest prose you can contrive. Have him take a long look at that sunset—up until now, he has only seen miserly slices of it, through those grotty Venetian blinds in his grotty office. Let’s hear him get voluble. Let’s hear him wax poetic.

Likewise if you have a very pastoral, discursive and mellifluous flow of words going—something on “the rapture of time,” perhaps—break it up. Spatter it with short, terse, bursts of words. Make something inappropriate occur. Have fun with the incongruity of what you make happen on the page.

You probably won’t keep these passages—although you never know—but you will entertain yourself. And it does wonders for the misery.

Read Off-Topic

Theoretically, you take a day off now and then. But since you probably can’t bear not to work at all, let yourself have a “busman’s holiday”—and read.

The trick, though, is not to read the same sort of pieces you tend to write. Instead, read as much out of your genre and off your topic as possible.

Read about the history of the paperclip (there really is a book about it) or discover how life looks from the point of view of a cockroach (either Gregor Samsa or archy...) Read a fictional biography of Archimedes and see what it was like to speculate on how many grains of sand might be in a box, or how to build a better catapult. (Trust me—this practice will help you build a better book....)

Keep a Copy-Book

I’m not talking about swiping someone else’s creative expression. That’s bad.

No, what I mean is getting out the old quill and pretending you’re a monk, copying down scripture and other great literature and saving civilization while you’re about it.

The idea behind this is very old-fashioned and yet it’s also quite modern. What you copy—not photocopy, not cut- and-paste, not download, but write out, preferably by hand—somehow moves into your brain through the concert of your eyes and fingers. What you copy will stick with you, will become part of you, ready to call upon in your own way, as a more powerful syntax, a more muscular delivery, when you need it.

Copy passages you admire—fragments of dialogue, chapter openings, cliffhangers, flashpoints between characters—whatever you need. This is a practice that pays dividends over time. If you’re stuck for something to copy today, try the passage below from Annie Dillard’s essay, “Living Like Weasels.”

A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go. One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand as deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off, and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

—Annie Dillard, from
Teaching a Stone to Talk