Wooden dog

I used to draw. But these days when I pick up the pen and look at the blank page, I just don’t know what I want to draw.

The same pattern plays out with writers as well. The blank page echoes a blank mind. I call this problem underdevelopment. And for some people it’s not a problem. They tap into an innate creative source that spontaneously generates the elements that they can turn into a story. Lucky them.

At a moment like this, what a blocked writer needs are ideas. I wrote a Medium article last year about where to get ideas, but the one tool that is most useful is also the biggest paradox.

Writing generates ideas.

There’s something about the pace of writing that will stimulate the mind to generate ideas, and if I can wrestle with my own self-doubt and loathing, the ideas will come through writing.

For example, I just wrote a short chapter. I feel like I can use maybe five percent of what I wrote. But at the end of the chapter I wrote about a boy whittling the wooden dog figure and I thought, of course this boy wants a dog. And I now have ideas about what the boy will do with the wooden dog, how he tries to get a dog, and what happens because of that.

And I’m procrastinating writing the next chapter. I don’t know what to write. And I know the solution. I have to get out of the mindset that I’m writing a novel. No, I’m generating the raw material that will become the novel.

Like a boy whittling a dog, I just need to get the rough shape carved out.