Conquering Writer's Block and Summoning Inspiration: Learn to Nurture a Lifestyle of Creativity by K.M. Weiland

Author:K.M. Weiland [Weiland, K.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: нонфикшн, Creative Writing
Publisher: PenForASword Publishing
Published: 2014-12-16T21:00:00+00:00

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one becomes a master.

Screenwriter William Goldman wrote in the essay anthology Tales From the Script (edited by Peter Hanson and Paul Robert Herman):

[N]obody knows anything. If we knew what we were doing, every movie would be wonderful.

At first glance, that may seem pretty self-defeating. If we’re never going to conquer the art of writing, what’s the point? I can hear all the perfectionists throwing in the towel already. But if we flip the coin on its head and look at the other side, we discover some mighty interesting benefits to this seeming defeatism—including the marvelous commiserative comfort of knowing that even the likes of Hemingway and Goldman struggled with getting a story to work.

Their characters didn’t always pop, their dialogue sometimes fell flat, their endings sometimes bombed—and they didn’t know how to fix it. They stared at the cursor (or whatever it was authors stared at before the advent of the word processor) in frustration. They probably procrastinated. They undoubtedly experienced those moments of terror when they looked at the blank page.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? And yet these writers, and many more just like them, have produced lasting literature and film. Hemingway won the Pulitzer and the Nobel; Goldman won two Oscars.

Because of its inherent connection to humanity’s emotional and subconscious core, art can’t be contained in a rigid set of principles. It’s an evolving, shifting, rather nebulous creation that pours out of us in ways we can’t always control. Every book I write is a new adventure. Perhaps I master each story as I write it, but that doesn’t prepare me for the next story I write. I have to learn afresh how to write each story.

We study the craft in order to create the most effective vessel possible for our art, but effective vessels don’t, in themselves, constitute great art. It’s that bit of uncontrollable magic that boils up from someplace we didn’t even know we had that makes all the difference. None of us can control that, no matter how long we’ve been writing, how many books we’ve published, or how much we’ve studied the craft.

That’s the joy of fiction: that this unexplainable magic can somehow pour from our unworthy fingertips and create something that will touch the lives of others and be remembered beyond our own lifetimes. If we knew what we were doing every step of the way, the adventure of it all would be long gone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.