Spiderman, Peter Parker, and the Gift of Writer’s Block

Below we have two photos: Spiderman and Peter Parker. What’s the difference?

This is easy enough.

Picture 1: Outfit, babe, crazy powers.

Picture 2: Doofus. 

(What’s he doing in that picture anyway? It looks like someone just stole his doughnut.)

Do you remember what turned him into a doofus? Remember this shot?

His spideygrip had failed him. And it failed him because he was trying to deny his essential spideyness. Remember?

This is what writers do all the time. Instead of going out and swinging from the skyscrapers, they turn into creative doofuses because they deny their essential storyness and end up unable to wield any power at all.

What am I talking about?

I’m talking about writer’s block.

Cringe, shudder–the horror, the horror.

No, stop with the Psycho music. Writer’s block is not one of the bad guys.

This is the truth: writer’s block is a gift. 

Somehow, some cabal of nitwits turned that simple fact onto its head. And it causes problems wherever it goes.

Of course, I didn’t know this starting out. And so that ignorance was one of the KEY things that kept me wandering around in the bushes for 10 years. It’s one of the marvelous insights I learned in Card’s boot camp that blew a hole through the wall of my sniveling prison of unproductivity.

What I learned was that writer’s block was not something to be avoided. It couldn’t be avoided. Shouldn’t be. It was a natural part of the process. And “writer’s block” was just a stupid name for the fabulous inner spideysense we have for story. (I could use “writeysense,” but that word’s so lacking in brawn it makes me cringe.) What I learned was that this inner sense starts acting up when one of four things begin to go wrong.

I’m going to help you learn how to listen to your writersense (humm, maybe that one’s okay), how to recognize the four things it alerts us to, and exactly what you need to do to fix them.