Five ways to get over writer's block

RLF Fellow, Heather Dyer, on her journey from being stuck to finding her flow

© Fran Pulido & RLF

RLF Fellow Heather Dyer describes how her success as a writer led to a major creative writing block and how she managed to overcome this hurdle, let go and find a new path. If you’re suffering from writer’s block too, Heather has five tips to help you become creative.

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When someone called me at work with the news that a major publisher had accepted my first picture book, Tina and the Penguin, I felt like I’d won the lottery. At last, I would be a published author! And I had high hopes that this book would open the doors to my career as a professional writer. I’d already written two, as yet unpublished novels for older children (The Fish in Room 11 and The Girl with the Broken Wing). Buoyed by my success with Tina and the Penguin, I sent these novels out to agents simultaneously. The children’s publisher, The Chicken House, offered me a two-book contract. Hurrah! I quit my job and received an advance for books three and four in the same genre.

But then the trouble began.

The first two novels were well received. The Times wrote that The Fish in Room 11 was “a little classic” and Richard and Judy’s TV programme featured The Girl with the Broken Wing in their children’s book club. The books were translated into several languages, made into audio books, read on the radio and studied in schools at Key Stage 2. I went on book tours, did school visits, and spoke at the Hay Festival.

The problem was I wasn’t making much progress on the fourth book. Months passed. My advance ran out. So I doubled down. I moved back into my parents’ B&B and spent all day typing in my attic room. But I just couldn’t come up with a storyline that worked. Two years passed this way. One weekend, my aunt and uncle visited. When they heard that I hadn’t published anything for a couple of years, even though I was writing every day, my uncle looked at me and said: “How long are you going to give this?”

“I’m not giving up!” I told him. I subscribed to the belief that if at first you don’t succeed, you try again – and try harder. So I pressed on, single-minded. I was like the mouse that paddles frantically in the jug of cream, trying to churn it into butter and climb out. But I just wasn’t getting any traction.

My first books had been written in evenings and weekends while working full-time. They’d begun with a single image or a scene that triggered a cascade of events that unfolded with an internal logic and organic complexity that had surprised even me. But now, each storyline I started fell apart. My ideas were superficial, flat, static. I began to think I was a three-book wonder.

Then, on the car radio one day, I heard a musician describing the difficulty he’d had in trying to follow up a successful debut album – and I realised I was suffering from the book equivalent of ‘second album syndrome’, otherwise known as the sophomore slump. Except in my case it was fourth book syndrome. My first three titles had been written before signing any contracts. Now, for the first time, I was writing as a published author, and I was writing under contract. This changed everything.

Sophomore slump is often blamed on the pressure a writer feels to outperform themselves. No writer wants to disappoint their readers or their publishers. Then there’s the pressure of a deadline, and the knowledge that if you don’t deliver something good – and soon – you’ll run out of cash. This all conspires to make us try too hard and care too much – an attitude that any writer can fall prey to, published or unpublished.

Because the real heart of the problem is this: there’s a certain passivity to the creative process. In his book Wherever You Go, There You Are, the mindfulness guru, Jon Kabat-Zinn, describes this mode as non-doing:

“It reeks of paradox. The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self-involvement and greediness can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work, or the work itself, so that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying, even if it is good. Good scientists know this mind state and guard against it because it inhibits the creative process and distorts one’s ability to see connections clearly.”

Non-doing is the ability to act fully in the present, exploring with the open-minded curiosity of a child or an amateur – without relying on our preconceptions and without being too invested in the outcome. In Zen Buddhism, there’s another term for this condition: “beginner’s mind”. Beginners mind is essential to living truly and deeply. It’s also, according to Shunryu Suzuki-roshi in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind the “real secret of the arts”

For the beginner, everything is new, so we’re hyper alert to the aliveness and unpredictability of each moment. We give everything equal attention, rather than seeing only what we’re looking for. We navigate by instinct and intuition. Creativity, too, demands that we abandon our road maps, and are open and receptive, free from preconceptions or expectations. I’d approached my first books with beginner’s mind. Back then, writing had been an adventure, an escape. Now, writing was work; I was more invested in the end result than the process itself.

But then I took a detour. My dad broke his back in a paragliding accident, and was laid up in hospital for six months. I had to help my mum with the B&B, so writing took a backseat for a while. During that time I had a dream. There was no storyline: just two boys’ bedrooms in a country house, and a girl cousin somewhere in the background. There was something about the situation that intrigued me though. I described the house, entered that world, and waited to see what would happen. A story unfolded which, eventually, became The Boy in the Biscuit Tin – and the first title in that original two-book contract. It was as though now that my priorities were elsewhere, the story could creep up on me from the sidelines.

Unfortunately, I never did deliver the final book. I tried, but nothing seemed to hit the mark. As the years passed I had to accept that I might never write another book again. One night I walked to the top of a hill near my parents house and looked out across the valley, and realised that I would need to find something else to do with my life. It felt as if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

The following morning, my creativity returned in full force in several new directions, like water spurting from a burst mains. First, I wrote adolescent poetry that I’d never show to anyone. Next, I published a collection of short stories I’d been writing on the side. Then, my newfound obsession with the creative process led me into a doctorate on the psychology of creativity, which I now use in my work as an academic writing coach and creativity consultant – and I’ve started writing a book about it.

I used to sympathise with one-book wonders like Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind) or Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) or even Arundati Roy, who published her second novel twenty years after The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997. But now, I realised that maybe these authors had not been slogging away trying to repeat their early successes, as I’d imagined. Maybe their creativity had led them in other directions?

It turns out that after writing Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell became heavily involved in supporting the war effort, and Ken Kesey became a key figure in the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Since publishing The God of Small Things, Arundati Roy has spent most of her time on political activism and non-fiction. Their passions took them on detours which led them away from their fiction and on to other projects.   

Restraining my need to control and achieve is a daily practice. I now find it helpful to imagine the creative process like a river that I need to seek out and follow, rather than a flow I should try to direct.

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If you are struggling with a creative block, there are a few things you could try in order to return to your beginner’s mind and, from there, rejoin the flow:

1. Do you have a hunch that something about your project isn’t quite right? Tune in to the tenor of your feelings. Admit them. Only when you’re sitting in full acceptance of the current situation, will you see around and beyond it.

2. Go where the warmth is. What snags your attention? What appeals? Start anywhere. Take detours if you want to, even if you can’t see where you’re headed.

3. Go deeper instead of further. Prioritise the integrity of this scene, this sentence, rather than a distant goal.

4. Persist, but at the pace of the project’s own unfolding. Don’t force it, or rush to finish.

5. If your curiosity takes you away from writing altogether, follow it. Maybe you’ll find yourself being creative in another direction entirely. One day you might even write a book about it.

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Heather Dyer is an award-winning children’s author. The Fish in Room 11 (Chicken House/Scholastic) won the Highland book awards in 2004. The Girl with the Broken Wing was featured as one of Richard and Judy’s ‘best children’s books ever’ in 2007, and The Boy in the Biscuit Tin was nominated for a Galaxy best British children’s book award in 2008. Heather’s books have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4, translated into several languages and studied in schools at key stage 2. They feature ordinary children to whom something magical happens. Friendship, family and freedom are the themes explored.

Heather currently teaches creative writing and academic workshops as an RLF Consultant Fellow.