Writer's Block? You're kidding.

As a young artist, I did wonder what would happen if ideas dried up. What if I hit a creative block? Some impasse I could not work around. I was in a very competitive atmosphere in my second year of Art School. Our professors would stroll through the studios every Monday morning and decide who had made the best pieces over the course of the last week, especially over the weekend when they were not there. So this assumes that the best students are not taking time off. We were still expected to produce even though ‘class’ was not in session. We did have twenty-four-hour access to our studios, after all.

To return to ideas drying up. I had several good art habits at this point; one was keeping a daily sketchbook. I realized that I could return to any half-formed ideas in there and just start making those if I did run out of ideas.

Perhaps it is easier to keep the ‘process’ of creativity more mysterious in the visual arts. The connections of ideas between pieces of art are more difficult to see if you don’t see the intermediary stages documented in a sketchbook.

Creativity with words is my current medium, that is to say, writing. The process seems much more transparent. In my process, I don’t work with an outline. I try to create problems for the characters and solve them during a chapter. It gets a bit tricky with a novel, tying ideas together over the course of hundreds of pages, but that is another process.

I am at twenty-two thousand words of my sequel novel. About one hundred pages so far. The set-up is done. Now some characters and dangling storylines collide, creating fun problem-solving.

I found that in this current scene, if I changed two small descriptive elements, this created a problem for two other characters nearby. So, as I finished the first scene, the new elements provided another branch for the story. Of course, when I remember a line from the first book, the scene that emerged was the completion of the foreshadowing in the first chapters of the first book. Separated by hundreds of pages and about two years of writing. Writing is truly a wonderful process to discover in retirement.