Writing and writer's block

Any writers here?

I'm writing a book, and I can not for the life of me finish more than about one paragraph in a day while still feeling satisfied by the quality of my work.

If anyone's had this problem, are there any suggestions as to how to improve my "creative stamina"? At this rate, this thing will take years to finish.

Sometimes just taking a short break from writing works. After you've been away from writing and see it again, it seems new and new ideas might crop up.

maybe work on your quantity - just mind dump and dont edit til a day or two later. work on leaving the perfecting for tomorrow.

i write alot for my job and could tweak and tweak and tweak my language as long as i have time to change it before it goes out the door.

when i dont have the time i have to just mind dump and come back and restructure and recraft vocabulary and phraseology.

i think it's best to treat it like a job: decide what time of day you're going to write, have a conducive workspace, and just make it automatic.  i wrote a novel one summer when i was working part time, just to see if i had the discipline to do it: i wrote every day from eight until noon, and my deadline was labour day.  it wasn't long before the hardest part was tearing myself away to go to my real job :)

stephen king wrote a great book on this, on writing.  he doesn't pretend to be a great writer; he just talks about discipline and craft.

julia cameron's stuff on creativity is also great.  check out the artist's way.  rollo may's the courage to create is another good one.

Original Post by watergirl:

maybe work on your quantity - just mind dump and dont edit til a day or two later. work on leaving the perfecting for tomorrow.

i write alot for my job and could tweak and tweak and tweak my language as long as i have time to change it before it goes out the door.

when i dont have the time i have to just mind dump and come back and restructure and recraft vocabulary and phraseology.

Actually, I hadn't really considered that, but now that you mention it, it seems like it could work well. I tend to focus heavily on phrasing (Choosing every word carefully), so it's hard for me to just write something I'm not satisfied with and plan to fix it up later... but it sounds like a good idea if I can adjust to it.

Original Post by pgeorgian:

i think it's best to treat it like a job: decide what time of day you're going to write, have a conducive workspace, and just make it automatic.  i wrote a novel one summer when i was working part time, just to see if i had the discipline to do it: i wrote every day from eight until noon, and my deadline was labour day.  it wasn't long before the hardest part was tearing myself away to go to my real job :)

stephen king wrote a great book on this, on writing.  he doesn't pretend to be a great writer; he just talks about discipline and craft.

julia cameron's stuff on creativity is also great.  check out the artist's way.  rollo may's the courage to create is another good one.

Well, the main problem has been that if I try to keep writing, I experience a decline in the quality of my writing pretty quickly. So rather than not wanting to do it, I felt unable to do it for too long.

But I think if I took this suggestion in conjunction with watergirl's, it might work pretty well. Anyway, I'll see if I can't find a copy of some of those books in the library. Thanks.

Original Post by watergirl:

maybe work on your quantity - just mind dump and dont edit til a day or two later. work on leaving the perfecting for tomorrow.

i write alot for my job and could tweak and tweak and tweak my language as long as i have time to change it before it goes out the door.

when i dont have the time i have to just mind dump and come back and restructure and recraft vocabulary and phraseology.

 

I agree. I noticed that if I was to stop everytime to edit, to find better vocabulary and what not, I lose my train of thoughts/creativity.Then whenever your stamina runs out, take a little break then come back to it and start editing.

And this might be just me, I like writing on paper with a pen/cil. I don't really mind typing back to computer later, I find it easier to concentrate because you don't really jump back and forth as you could with computer.

I'll second the recommendation for Julia Cameron's work as well as Natalie Goldberg's books on writing.

The other thing you might try if you get stuck on your "main" work is to write something else, something short that you don't intend to keep, just to prime the pump.

One of my favorite tricks is to start in the middle instead of the beginning.

Original Post by fruit_tart:

And this might be just me, I like writing on paper with a pen/cil. I don't really mind typing back to computer later, I find it easier to concentrate because you don't really jump back and forth as you could with computer.

many of us (and you can include me in this generalization) type faster than we can think.  or, at least, faster than we can compose.  writing by hand can help to facilitate slowing the process to brain speed.

if the opposite is true and you're a slow typist, that can disrupt the flow. 

i think i write as well on computer now as i do by hand--probably better--but when i first started using a computer, i know my writing suffered (yep, i'm that old).

This is one of my biggest problems, the "perfectionist" mode. I learned the hard way that no matter how much you labor over one word, the first, second and even third drafts are never perfect, so go ahead and dump everything in and rewrite later. Steven King says writing is re-writing. A trick for me is that I open a new file for every chapter, so I don't re-read the stuff I wrote continously and think it's crap and start over. It's been working quite well.

Original Post by ofeliajones:

This is one of my biggest problems, the "perfectionist" mode. 

i was the same way - it took me awhile to break free of 'perfectionist' mode and develop my 'blah blah blah' mode. you gotta work on your 'blah blah blah' mode.

if any author knows about quantity i would say king would be a great mentor. amazing how much volume that man can generate, such an imagination too. i love how he wrote both harry potter as a brand name and the incident when he got hit by a car into the dark tower series. sooooo creative. 

Just write.  Its what I do, I sit down and write a steady stream of conciousness for a while.  Anything that pops in my head gets written down, even if its just "Wow, I want a Fudgesicle."  Think about your book and if your mind wanders, let it wander but still write your mental wanderings down.

Then go back and read everything.  Whenever I do this, a sentence pops out at me or a thought or a statement and I go "Oh wow, that would be great to incorporate" and I can go from there.