LinovaA

I'd be down for watching both myself.
I feel like just watching the first season and not the second would be kinda.. eh. If I am going to rate the series in the end, I would much rather rate the entire thing as a whole.
 
If not, I'll just watch it anyway. 'Cause I am a rebel.

Thank you, Major! It's everything I could have asked for. And much more. I dedicate this hatemail reveal to you. I tried to keep the editing to a minimum, but I did censor the language and clarify one or two phrases.
 

 
Sometimes the hatemail is so absurd I can't help myself and I respond. Doesn't happen very often, but it happened with this one. Enjoy, and please take your seats: the revelations in this exchange may be overwhelming.  
* I think he meant "or"
   
 
* I can neither confirm nor deny this statement ** Trying to keep a straight face  
 
 

Fire Emblem 4 is actually one of my favorites. That one along with Thracia 776 make up my two favorites for sure. Your avatar is the wielder of Mystletainn if I do recall correctly (his name escapes me at the moment).
 
Also, Kana is definitely a good classical nakige to read at some point. Definitely one of my favorites as of now as well. ^^

As everyone knows, I play a lot of VNs. 
Clephas has his threads to talk about untranslated works, and they're pretty neat. It's nice to get reviews on releases or just random VNs he plays. 
I'm probably the person here with the most knowledge of translated VNs, so I thought "why not give this corner thingy a try". 
 
So, here I am. Whenever I read, re-read or feel like writing about a random VN, I'll post those here. Hopefully the thread will be of some use to get everyone to play some more VNs~
 
I'll basically introduce some VNs and give my thoughts on them. The introduction part may be a bit boring for the people who know the VN already... But what I'm aiming at here is having people who don't know those VNs play them. If you already know the VN I'm talking about, you're not my target audience. If you can still have fun with the post, that's great, though <3
 
It'd be kind of weird to post the thread without any mini-review, though... 
Well, recently enough, I've been replaying Daibanchou. 
 
 
Daibanchou is a game mostly reliant on it's strategy RPG gameplay. Simply put, the story isn't good enough to keep you playing it by itself. A mostly generic story and underdeveloped characters make the story not enough to keep you going solely because of it. I would say that differently from some VNs where gameplay is something that complements the story, gameplay is the main focus of the game here. That and H-scenes. There are a lot of them. 
 
Now, Daibanchou is an alicesoft game. That's self-explanatory for many people, but alicesoft has their own, eh, style when it comes to telling a story... And that style is generally convenient wacky bullshit with ok comedy that eventually leads to serious story segments (that will generally revert to the usual wacky bullshit shortly afterwards).
 
Still, their wacky bullshit is fun. It's not exhaustive to read, and the fights you'll be conducting should be enough incentive on their own to make you pass through those fun moments. In daibanchou's case, you have a badass protagonist with his badass crew fighting their way to conquer Japan and destroy the system to make something new. Meanwhile, our protagonist is recovering special, superpowerful buttons that came from who-knows-where that just turn out to be in the hands of large faction leaders to make his kuu-kinda-tsundere super fast wolf fiance go back to her human form. Getting those buttons will force you to fight your way through tanks, vampires, ninjas and pirates (or religious freaks, depending on which route you pick) and be a badass all through it. 
 
Also, don't mind the fact you do have a fiance. You're free to have sex with anyone. She doesn't seem to care about it. The other girls don't either. You have amnesiac katana-wielding submissive proper japanese girl with super regeneration, try-hard megane class rep who can capture enemies easier, loli doll magical-girl who hits from far away and gives tea to everyone, blonde ojou-sama political-ish leader who inspects countries and has lots of guts and ninja-girl whose route I never bothered to finish (what, reality is tough. I can't know about everyone ) 
 
I have this feeling there's another heroine. All of them have separate routes. And there are sex scenes with plenty of characters who aren't those too, just in case you're wondering. 
 
I also feel like I should warn everyone that mandatory rape will happen in this game (though not by the protagonist, differently from Rance).
 
You're free to follow through all routes whenever you want, except for one of them. Your decision on which place to conquer in the second chapter will permanently seal one heroine route of two. The routes are easy to follow through once the girl appears in your harem (just have sex with her when you get the chance to. It's not hard) but getting the girl to appear in your harem can be troublesome. 
 
Oh, by the way, everyone got their superpowers when a hole to hell (or something like it, anyway) opened up in the middle of Japan a few years before everything started. Except only students got superpowers. Because reasons. 
 
What I told you so far is the basic plot of the game. There's a lot more hidden behind it. The hidden parts of the story are interesting... But all in all, you'll be playing to get the not-so-post-apocalyptic battle royale experience where your small group of badasses fights against small armies and other groups of badasses. All of them with superpowers or some other similar gimmick.
 
The characters are fun, and even if you dislike them, you just don't have to trigger their events. You can even just fire a character you don't like if you don't want them to be in your army. The game gives you a lot of freedom in that aspect. The soundtrack is pretty neat, and I personally like the style (though I know it's not for everybody).
 
All in all, if you like this type of thing, maybe you'll want to try out the game. I rated it a 9 because I enjoyed it a lot, though it's probably more of a 7 or 6. 

You may be on to something there. I've got a lot of material.

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

what have I done
 
EDIT: I'm interested for various reasons

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

So now that we have a creative corner, I figured I would try and contribute some my knowledge to the wonderful people around here. That and maybe I am just bored and done all of my assignments. 
 
I am still pretty new around here, but if I can help even one person with this, well… that is good enough I guess.


So, as the title says, we will be talking about one of the main struggles almost every single writer will go through at least once during one of their projects. Whether that project be a novel, visual novel, heck even essays and translations to a much lesser extent; it will strike all of us eventually. It is more than likely that you, the reader, have already experienced Writer’s Block at some point, so you already understand the pains associated with it. Or maybe you are one of the lucky few who have never had to deal with such a thing, in which case I envy you entirely and completely.
 
You could be going at breakneck speed through your manuscript, writing tens of thousands of words without having any issue, but sooner or later… you may find yourself smacking your head against a brick wall of blankness unable to figure out where to go from where you are.
 
 
So first off, let’s talk about Writer’s Block and what it is.
 
 
What is Writer’s Block?
 
Writer’s Block, by definition, is when an author loses his ability to produce new work thus creating a block in his creative train of thought. This block can run you down for a few hours, to a much longer time over the span of years when in extreme cases.
So looking at this as writers, this is not something we particularly want. We want to be able to avoid this sort of thing happening to us. But how do we do that?
Well the tough answer to that is that we cannot just so easily prevent it. There are some ways that help keep our minds fresh and circulating new ideas, but there is no sure fire way to keep yourself safe from breaking against the Great Wall of Blanking Out.
Writer’s Block can be entirely discouraging for an author, and for someone who is just getting used to writing larger works; can be absolutely catastrophic in terms of their will to keep writing. I know when I first started trying to write my first manuscript for the first… second… third… fourth… fifth… and sixth times. I honestly lost track after that, but my real problem was that I would get so far in, maybe about 2000 words and all of a sudden everything I had in my head would simply vanish. The Great Wall of Blanking Out would suddenly raise itself in front of my word count and would not allow it to progress any further.

So let’s talk about ways to prevent Writer’s Block, even if it is in a small way. None of it is a guarantee, as everyone is different; but these are the ways that I have found to work and that have worked for the people I have helped through their own Writer’s Block issues.
 
Preventing Writer’s Block:
 
So as we know, Writer’s Block affects our ability to create new work. This does not mean that it only affects new project ideas, but rather it affects the entire creation process. You get so far in and all of a sudden your train of thought is just gone and you have nothing left you can put out because you have hit The Great Wall of Blanking Out. Some don’t even make it as far as the keyboard, thinking that they have not developed their idea enough, or that they just do not have time.
 
So let’s get down to it:
 
1. Outlines Can Be Your Bible/Insert Religious Text
 
One problem I have seen a lot of people run into is that they can go so far in, but all of a sudden lose everything they were about to write. When they just got an idea and started writing, they did not think ahead, and only knew the general plot outline of what they wanted.
 
That is not to say you can't do this, but you run the risk of hitting a wall sooner or later if you don't really know where you are going. Kinda like wandering around the woods when you have never been inside those particular woods before. Go too far and you may end up a tad lost.
 
Taking time and writing an outline of the events that take place in the story is an excellent idea. It provides you with a foundation to build upon when you go to sit down and write. This outline is merely just an outline, so just like your first draft (which I will get to next) you can spill your raw creativity into it and just let the ideas flow out on to the page.
 
Your outline doesn't even have to make coherent sense, just so long as it gives you an idea of the direction you are heading. As long as you have a general idea of what you are doing, the risk of suddenly losing yourself and your story in the first 5-10k words can be greatly reduced.
 
2. Your First Draft is not Your Final Draft
 
Here is another hang up that can easily discourage anyone who is writing. As writers, it makes sense that we have all read wonderful stories. Masterpieces in our own eyes. So obviously, when writing our own works, we want them to be just as good if not better if you are feeling really ambitious.
 
So you sit down and you start writing. You get through the first chapter and you feel pretty darn satisfied, but you take a look through what you have written… and realize that it is not to the quality that you want it to be… so you start editing… but all of a sudden, you realize there is more wrong with it so you start editing that stuff too. Before you know it you have spent two hours editing the first chapter/portion of your work and you just feel absolutely drained from the ordeal. Most people I talk to end up losing their creative flair for the work after that, or if they get any further, end up losing it after subsequent bouts of this over editing process.
So what is the problem here?
 
Editing your first draft to look like a final draft before you have even written the whole thing is just bad news. The Writer and the Editor within you coexist, but they should not be working together at this early stage in the game. The first draft, just like outline, is where you can poor out your raw creativity and just roll with it. No author just sat down, puked out 100k+ words and created a masterpiece… and if they claim to have done so, I am going to call absolute bullshit.
 
Writing a good work takes time, and one needs to force their inner Editor to just calm down and be patient. While the Editor is critical and meticulous, the Writer is freeform and creative. The critical side of the Editor can stifle the creativity of the Writer if they are working side by side at the same time. They do complement one another, just… not at the same time.
 
3. Keep Writing
 
Another pitfall that one might want to avoid is not continuing. You may start with the intention of finishing, but maybe tomorrow you just “don’t feel like it”. But then, the next day after that… you find that you “don’t feel like it again”.
 
Once you start making an excuse not to write like that, you are already on a road to pain when it comes to finishing your work. Writing a story is a time investment, and you are going to have to want it in order for you to even think about finishing it. “Not feeling like it” just isn't in the equation.
 
The problem with this, is that after enough days of not feeling it, you might decide to come back to it. However, this is another lead in to allowing The Great Wall of Blanking Out to encroach on what you are trying to write. Writer’s Block will settle in and all of a sudden you have nothing for what you want to write.
Even if you only write a single sentence, coming back and visiting your project each day is a good way to prevent it from fading in your mind. For one of the main things that Writer’s Block thrives off… is stagnation in the creative sense.
 
_____________________________________________________________________________________
I struggled for years with Writer’s Block. I first started writing original works back in grade four. Until about four years ago, I had never finished anything. Writer’s Block would simply come over and snatch my ideas away from me. Once I hit Grade 9 and came up with a new story (where my Username originates), I just kept in my head, afraid of having development of that halted by another bout of Writer’s Block.
These are just a few techniques you can use to prevent it. Curing Writer’s Block however, is a lot easier than one might think. It requires a lot of willpower, but it can be done.
 
LinovaA’s Method for Working through Writer’s Block:
 
Now while it is no guarantee, as with all of the things in this guide (oh gods this has become a guide?), it may help you if you find yourself in the middle of a particularly long bout of Writer’s Block.
So what happens when you hit this Great Wall of Blanking Out? You run out of ideas. So where do you even go there?
 
The best way to explain is to show an example of what I did.
I sat down and looked at the paper and decided I needed to come up with something of my own creation. Doesn’t matter if it is cliché, but it needs to have a small level of originality to it.

So the best bet was to just come up with a random scenario. However that is normally impossible with Writer’s Block. So here is a format I came up with
 
<Adjective> <noun> <verb> <noun>.
That is all.
 
It’s best not to agonize over this. Seriously just pick any random adjective and any random noun that fits for the first two.

Of course it ended up being this for me:
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth.
 
Not exactly the most elegant of scenarios, but we’ll work with it. So now that one has this completely strange scenario, you need to expand it somehow. So you simply need to add one detail at a time.
 
Purple Elephants attack Earth and enslave humanity.
 
Great. Just great.
 
Add a few details, but after adding a few more details in this fashion… you take your pencil and scratch out something and edit the grammar of the sentence. I of course edited out Purple Elephants.

Earth is attacked and humanity is enslaved by pseudo-Humans from Titan, enforcing a dystopian society.
 
Voila. A scenario. This generally will not work the first time to fix your Writer’s Block. You need to do this over and over again until your brain starts easing up and those little details start coming to you much quicker. Or perhaps until you no longer need to use the simplistic format I laid out earlier.
 
While a lot of people would say to go out and wait for the ideas to come to you, I believe and more proactive approach of force starting your creative engine to be the more efficient way when in a deep rooted bout of Writer’s Block. Of course, the less proactive approach may work with you more. I can't tell you if it is or not because everyone is different.
 
The End:


I do hope I have helped someone out here. I understand Writer’s Block being a huge challenge for a lot of people who are into writing like myself. Hopefully you come out of reading this learning something new, and if you didn’t… well thanks for giving me the time of day regardless.  None of this is guaranteed to help, but hopefully I have helped give you some tools to help you keep writing and avoid Writer's Block, and perhaps even conquer it.
 
So yeah, thanks for stopping by and giving this a read.
 
 
Edit: I will be coming back to fix any typos when I get home.

Good idea!
 
In that case... for the glory of the thread!
 



 
Right before my history class. o-o

This thread is beautiful. :')
 
Or in layman's terms... sexy as ****. xD

Oh man.. the tears were real there. 
 

Oh gosh. I was wondering if a thread like this would appear.
 
Now let me put it this way. I am a big softy.. or as others would put it, a crybaby.
 
Pretty much anything even relatively sad in an anime, VN, or hell even a manga will bring those unbidden tears to my eyes. Doesn't even need to be sad either. With Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso I pretty much tear up on every single episode, because the coupling of the music with the situation is just so well done and it just moves me greatly when I am watching.
 
Clannad was the first one that really got me. Clannad was the second anime to make me cry, with Code Geass R2 being the first. However it was the first anime to make me bawl my eyes out. Seriously just:


 
After that scene I had to push my laptop away from me and just kinda... wait till I stopped bawling. Those were not manly tears... those were bitch tears. xD
 
 
So, here is a list of anime that I can remember crying at some point during them (there are probably more):
 



 
So yeah... I cry easily.... xD

Just saw this today while browsing this morning... I was pleased.
 
(Riki - Little Busters -- Shima - Clannad)

i was told to spam this threadlike i always do.spam.
also i was told to post this pic so here:

I was playing some Fire Emblem Awakening today and yesterday in celebration of the announcement of the new Fire Emblem.
My body isn't ready for a new set of waifus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz2LJ-4DDWU
 
Only thing I'm excited for.  Oh and Majora's Mask will be on the 13th. 

I was playing some Fire Emblem Awakening today and yesterday in celebration of the announcement of the new Fire Emblem.
My body isn't ready for a new set of waifus.