Writer’s Block and the Value of Blogging

For a little over a year I have been suffering from an extreme case of writer’s block.  This isn’t to say that I haven’t written, but my word count has been frighteningly low, especially when it comes to The Nathan Daniels Saga: Part 4.  I have been struggling with this, while all along not realizing there was a tool in my belt that was being under utilized: The Blog.

Now, I know what you are saying: “If you are suffering from writer’s block, how does blogging help, I mean it does require writing, and on top of that, you yourself trashed the whole idea of writing non-paying copy when you could be writing words that actually pay you in one of your earliest blog posts. (Link)”  Ok, so you probably *didn’t* say that, but I am sure you at least thought it… Right?

Over the course of the last three years my view on blogging has, shall we say, evolved, and my year-long struggle with the dreaded writer’s block finally cemented this new view today, as I struggled to write just over 1200 words of The Nathan Daniels Saga: Part 4.

Blogging is GOOD, maybe even GREAT, but only time will tell on that second part.

Why is blogging good? For that we need to take a trip down memory lane. (Anecdote alert.)

Back in the mists of the preceding century, I was an undergraduate at MIT (Not the Montana Institute of Truck Driving, just saying…).  As part of my Humanities Concentration (Yes, the world’s technology mecca requires you actually have a humanities *concentration*) I took a class called Writing Science Fiction which was taught by none other than Joe Haldeman (Yes, THE Joe Haldeman, author of the Forever War, and countless others, if this name means nothing to you, click here.)  In one of our classes he discussed how to combat writer’s block:

“The best cure for writer’s block is a Caribbean cruise.“

Having been on a number of Caribbean cruises, albeit prior to considering myself a writer, I can say truer words have not been spoken.  However, realizing he was talking to a group of poor college students and not multi-million copy selling authors, he followed with this equally true gem:

“But, since most of you can’t afford a Caribbean cruise, here are some other strategies for coping with writer’s block.“

We then spent the remainder of the hour long class talking about strategies for beating those two most dreaded words in any writer’s vocabulary.  What virtually all of the strategies (except for the cruise, obviously) boiled down to was:

JUST WRITE

Most of the time just getting something down, even if it is gibberish, is enough to overcome the block, because often the block is not of a general nature, but is specific to something you are already working on.  However, sometimes the biggest impediment to this most simple and straight forward cure for the Block is similar to my protestations against blogging: How can I justify writing non-paying copy when I have all this paying copy to be written?

Enter the blog.  Although copy written for a blog does not directly pay, it can help increase the return on paying copy that you have already written, or will write in the future by:

1. Increasing your visibility among your existing fan base.  A blog post helps to reassure your fans that you aren’t dead, and are, in fact, still capable of stringing words together in a coherent fashion.
2. Luring new fans into your world of prose.  A share by one of your fans to someone that has never heard of you can lead to more book sales.
3. Increased traffic to your website.  (If you are an author and don’t have a website, start one now, not tomorrow, now.  Here is a very helpful guide I used.)
4. Writing a blog post gets ideas that are rattling around in your head out of the way, allowing you to focus on your paid copy.

So, I both hope to be blogging more as I struggle with my current case of writer’s block, and hope that I suddenly become un-blocked and don’t blog anything for a while…

I guess we’ll see which way it goes.