Blocking Writer’s Block – Swallowing Rejection (With Bhavana)

Today, I thought I’d focus on one of the biggest blocks to a struggling writer:  rejection. Rejection feels awful to anyone, whether it arrives in one’s personal or professional life, but it presents a double-whammy for a writer, perhaps because it automatically hits on both the personal and professional level. Hard for anyone to swallow, […]

Blocking Writer’s/Editor’s Block – Major Restructuring? (Maybe Focus On the Laundry)

A bit of a dreary Sunday. The good news:  This morning, I finished a re-write of an old Nanowrimo novel.  This does not mean that I actually finished re-writing it, but that I finished another complete round of revisions. The bad news:  I haven’t done my laundry yet and the laundry room here gets really […]

Blocking Writer’s Block – A Beautiful Day (Oh No!)

It was a beautiful weekend in New York City. This can be a real trial for a would-be writer, especially one with a day job, a family, and at least one hamper of dirty laundry. Most writers do not like waste; they carefully save scraps of scribbled paper, notebooks, drafts.  Only a terrible mishap, or […]

A Pearl For the Blocked Writer: Let Go of The Bad News; the Grandiosity; Just Do What You Do.

I woke up today feeling terribly depressed.  Yes, it’s probably my chemistry (the down side of the m-word), but, as I browsed through the online New York Times, I also felt that I had every right to blame my hopelessness on the world in general. Everything seemed to bring up Reagan’s old (deficit-producing) supply-side economics; […]

More on Writer’s Block, Yoga, Pearl–Weaning Yourself From the Dependence on Acknowledgement i.e. Pats

    Yesterday, thinking about yoga and my dog Pearl, I wrote about blocking writer’s block through finding a seat in your blank page.  Mulling over these issues further made me think about the time, some years ago, when I stopped going to yoga classes. I practice Astanga yoga and had gone to six or […]

Blocking Writer’s Block – Ironing Out Problems With Confidence

I walked back home from my subway stop this morning (a trek) thinking I’d left my iron on.  I imagined my old, blinding, dog, Pearl, knocking it down (the iron was sitting on the floor in a far corner of  one room of my apartment).  I imagined terrible damage to Pearl, and then, in the […]

Blocking Writer’s Block – Part IX – An Exile of One’s Own

I’ve been thinking today about writer’s block in the context of both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.  This is, in part, due to the stress inherent in a bifurcated modern life (that is, a life of both struggling writer and struggling person), and, in part, to one daughter telling me about a paper on Dubliners […]

Blocking Writer’s Block Part VII – Don’t Show Draft Manuscripts Too Soon

Rule No.  9  –  Be Brave but Know Yourself.  Don’t Show Drafts Too Soon. In Part VI of this series, as Rule No. 8, I wrote, Be Brave, Read Aloud.  That post was about the liberation of reading your writing exercises aloud to your writing buddy, almost immediately following the writing of them. This type […]

Blocking Writer’s Block – First Assignment

Since I’ve been writing so much about the value of writer’s exercises, I thought it might be interesting to actually give you one. The rules are: Write for a pre-set time.  Ten minutes is a good start.  If you go over, fine, don’t go under. Don’t stop moving your pen, or stop typing.  If you […]

Monday Morning – Not Ready For It

The above image is from 1 Mississippi.   (Copyright Karin Gustafson) Check it out at link or on Amazon. If you’d rather think about poetry than Monday, check out poetry blogs; if you’re having a hard time writing, check out writers’ block blogs; if you’d rather just laugh (at me), check out Robert Pattinson blogs.