WRITING TIPS: WALLS

Somedays are golden and others are days we can’t write. One of the best way to overcome the walls of a writer’s block is to create your own walls.

Placing limits on what the story can or cannot contain will allow you to focus on what needs to be written vs all the possibilities of what could be.

I find I struggle most when the ideas are plentiful but don’t gel. A story about a boy with a toy car can go anywhere. But if we take that line and say the boy is a son of a mobster, but the story cannot have any guns or murder, we’ve narrowed our approach to the story, eliminating several possibilities.

Creating walls is narrowing your focus, and once you have precision focus the writing tends to flow quicker because you’re not addressing every possible problem, you’re just addressing one.

You can use genre to help narrow a story as well as time and place. A horror story with no cellphones makes life easier, right?

But if that cellphone works, then you have to focus on how you can still create fear when a call for help is just a quick selection of a contact’s info.

Avoiding tropes and cliches is something most writers try to do every single time they sit down–that’s creating a wall. I want to write a scary story, but I don’t want them to realize they suddenly have no cellphone connection.

Creating walls is narrowing your focus, and once you have precision focus the writing tends to flow quicker because you’re not addressing every possible problem, you’re just addressing one.