I'm staring at a short that needs a rewrite, and it's staring back and blowing raspberries at me.
Sometimes I play writing games for a sentence or two, and it can help oomph you off. Like, open the closest book to a random page, point to a random sentence and write a sentence that includes the first word you find longer than five letters.
It depends on why you're finding it hard at the moment, obviously. But I find my most common reason is trying too hard. By making the challenge something else, I forget the thing that's stopping me writing.
Hmm, there's a fair few I've collected over the years. They tend to fall into categories of:
Constraints: including a particular word or phrase, or excluding a particular word (good for words you use too often, or a fun challenge to exclude pronouns or articles or prepositions, etc) or letter (most common here is the letter 'e', though I find this tends to result in sentences that aren't remotely usable. Good if you're wanting to 'warm up', though, or distract yourself while your subconscious solves a problem.).
Continuous: you have to churn out words continuously, no break. If you can't think of what to write, you repeat the last word you wrote. Do this until you reach a particular time limit or a page limit. There's a site called "write or die" designed around this - on kamikazi setting it starts deleting words after too long a pause.
Process: Write the 'last' sentence in a sequence of action. Then write the sentence that came before that, then the sentence that came before that. So if the events happened as A, B, C, D, you write sentence D first, then sentence C, then sentence B, etc. (A much harder version: do it word-by-word, instead of sentence-by-sentence, ie, not only are you writing the paragraphs backwards, you're constructing each sentence backwards). I once wrote an entire short story like this, just off-the-bat to see where things went (or rather, how they started).
Spontaneity: keep a selection of books beside you. Open one, select a sentence at random - you must include this sentence in the paragraph. Also doable with tarot cards (include something from the drawn card), dice (include x-number of something) or a box of junk, if you happen to keep boxes of junk handy. The site Seventhsanctum also runs a plethora of prompt-programs online.
Association: A ret-con of what's usually a multi-writer game: write a story one-line-per-day in such a way that you can only ever see the sentence that came directly before, not the whole story. Alternative version - write half a sentence per day, same rules apply.
Dialogue: Start an argument with one of your characters (or the environment - anything can be a character). Make them angry, see what they do.
That's top-of-my-head, I did squoodles of these at uni. All of them can be combined and mixed up (ie, try writing your one-sentence-per-day story backwards, and each sentence has to include (dice-roll) number of something.) Maybe I should put up an archive of writer's games on my site... hmm.
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Date: 2010-04-26 05:48 am (UTC)Sometimes I play writing games for a sentence or two, and it can help oomph you off. Like, open the closest book to a random page, point to a random sentence and write a sentence that includes the first word you find longer than five letters.
It depends on why you're finding it hard at the moment, obviously. But I find my most common reason is trying too hard. By making the challenge something else, I forget the thing that's stopping me writing.
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Date: 2010-04-26 10:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-29 12:07 pm (UTC)That's top-of-my-head, I did squoodles of these at uni. All of them can be combined and mixed up (ie, try writing your one-sentence-per-day story backwards, and each sentence has to include (dice-roll) number of something.) Maybe I should put up an archive of writer's games on my site... hmm.