Writer's Block
By
Absalom of Yrth

Something that is often overlooked about building is that the best builders are first and foremost excellent writers. This really hit home for me about a year ago when I was putting together a panel of building judges for an awards system on ROMLama (we wound up scrapping the idea as being too much work eventually). The four people I asked to be judges turned out, in real life, to be a television writer, a magazine writer, a magazine editor, and an art student. This pointed out to me what I'd already suspected: good building is an art.

With that in mind, for today's tip I'd like to address the subject of writer's block. How to overcome it? If you have a little extra cash, I'd like to strongly recommend a book titled "Writing Down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg. No writer should be without it. The following exercise is taken from it:

Take a poetry book. Open to any page, grab a line, write it down, and continue from there. A friend calls it writing off the page." If you begin with a great line, it helps because you start right off from a lofty place. "I will die in Paris, on a rainy day... It will be a Thursday," by the poet Cesar Vallejo. "I will die on Monday at eleven o'clock, on Friday at three o'clock in South Dakota riding a tractor, in Brooklyn in a delicatessen," on and on. Every time you get stuck, just rewrite your first line and keep going. Rewriting the first line gives you a whole new start and a chance for another direction--"I don't want to die and I don't care if I'm in Paris or Moscow or Youngstown, Ohio."

So how can you apply this to building? Say you're working on a forest. Grab a volume from "The Lord of the Rings" and find a section that describes Mirkwood. Grab one line from it and copy it. Start writing from there. Don't think. Just let your mind take you wherever it will. Don't edit. Just let the words flow. This all sounds very spacey and new agey, but I promise you that it works. Leave the description as it is. Come back to it the following day. Take away the first line (the one copied from Tolkien). Edit. Keep what works, throw away what doesn't work. If you didn't fret too much over the perfect word the day before, it won't be painful to cut words away. Put another way, think of how much each of us types in conversation with one another every time we're online. Think of how disposable those words are. Let your descriptions be equally disposable. Let yourself write so much in your descriptions that you don't become married to the words. First and foremost, entertain yourself. Let your own words surprise you. If you let your mind wander enough, they will. Do not edit until the next day. Writing that seemed brilliant at the time may look like crap the next day. By the same token, writing that seemed cheesy may suddenly seem perfect.