By Bernard King
So, you sit and look at a blank page or screen for an hour, two hours, a day, two days, and even a week, waiting for the kick of an idea to start the words running.
The effort required to drag yourself to your desk becomes more demanding each time the block strikes.
The problem becomes more acute the more your writing improves. What was acceptable three months ago no longer sings. The sentences are dead, they do not interest, the plot has run out at eighty thousand words, not enough for your publisher.
Is this writers block?
I ask the question because, after some forty years of writing scripts and novels, it is one of the few writing experiences I have missed.
Have I just been lucky?
No, the reason I think is very different.
Come back thirty five years. TV techniques are in their infancy. Video has not been invented. Shows are recorded on film. Once the show starts it cannot be stopped. Film cost a fortune so the crew has only one chance to complete the show.
Panic!
Ten minutes into the show the producer realises their timing is out. They cannot move actors from one set to the next quickly enough.
Lines (gags) are needed to cover the action.
He turns to the writer. “ Three jokes please, you have five minutes.”
The writer (me) is paralysed, but worse, my thinking freezes in terror.
This scenario happened several times, but far from being a major problem, it taught me confidence and no matter how daunting the demand was, I could always deliver.
There is always a way around the brick wall that has suddenly risen in the middle of you plot. Your novel will continue even though you are convinced the story collapsed two words back.
That I think is the first reason the block has never arrived.
But most writers are never, and now never will be with the arrival of video, pinioned in the joke on demand position.
The second reason I have never met the block is the way I construct my stories.
My first couple of novels were stilted, boring and predicable works of art that I have buried long ago. I learned from them that for me, plotting a story chapter by chapter, preparing characters for their journey through the book, working out timescales and doing everything you are taught to do to write a book was the cause of the junk I finished up with.
The moment you plan your book you are restricting creativity. You lock yourself into a regime and if there is a problem en-route it can develop into the dreaded block.
The only requirement I need for my story is a good end. Once that is decided I start writing the first draft. My characters will tell me how they want to behave. Ideas for the story will be waiting for me when I reach them. If the story flags, I leave it and jump ahead and write a scene, or several, that I find exciting.
Invariably, when I return to the dull bit, new ideas brighten the moment and I breeze on.
The block cannot form, you are already twisting and turning the plot because you are not restricted by pencilled in characters or story line. Every line is an adventure, and it is exciting. This will permeate through to the reader, they will feel your enthusiasm and keep reading, and that is why you write.
These few words will help, I hope, those who regularly stare at the blank screen with an equally blank mind.
Change it, brainstorm the problem with other words and ideas, divert the plot, sack the character, you are the boss you can do what you like.
Oh and there is one other little thing - hard work.
Hemingway summed it up. Writing is sitting down with a typewriter, and then bleeding.
Bernard King became a scripwriter for radio and TV in the early sixties, writing for the Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin agency considered to be the top comedy office at the time. Fifteen years ago he took up novel writing and to date has written seven novels and three compilations of short stories.
He currently lives in the South of France with his French wife and when not writing looks after grandchildren and watches the wine grow.
Read more of his works over at bernardking.co.uk
Read more of his works over at bernardking.co.uk
