Combating Writer's Expanse

You've seen it countless times in the movies: a writer sits at his desk, staring at a blank screen (or paper in the days of the typewriter), not able to write. The implication is that he has no clue what to write, his mind's a blank slate. But, being a writer, I don't think that's entirely correct. I think the problem is that he has too much on his mind. He's asking himself, "Do I write the story about the mutant sapient turkeys or the one about the half-insane time traveler or...." And before you feminists get offended because I used "he" for the generalized pronoun, I will say that "he" is a projection of me, so I could've used "I." Those two ideas I mentioned earlier, they are actual stories in development from my fertile mind. But a fertile mind can still be a type of writer's block. To distinguish this type from the more "traditional" tabula rasa writer's block, I will call it "writer's expanse."

You see, we writers are a curious bunch; we can see a story in almost anything. You may see burning your tongue on hot coffee as an everyday annoyance; I may see the beginning of a four-part epic. We are trained that way, to avoid that dreaded tabula rasa. How? By writing to a prompt. "Write something about..." It focuses the mind. But the drawback is that everything becomes a prompt. Well, how do you combat that? The poison is also the cure: you write to the prompt. But you have to focus on just that prompt. You have to forget about that Idea you had when you were driving to work the other day. Focus. Easier said than done.

Publishers can help. They want to sell product to targeted readers. No one wants to produce something that includes both Historical Romance and Space Opera because the intersection of those two readerships is too small. So books and magazines are categorized in genres and themes. The writer is forced to write to a prompt. I wrote a story for thefirstline.com, which supplies the first sentence of the story and the writer comes up with the rest. I actually didn't get published there, but I changed the first line and it got published elsewhere. Still, that first sentence was the motivation I needed to write the story.

How does a writer combat writer's expanse when a publisher doesn't provide a prompt and a deadline? I'm still working on that. One way is by brute force. Those two stories I mentioned in the first paragraph, they came from prompts. One I think is near publishable. It helped that the prompts came from a writer's group because I had to show up the next meeting with at least a semi-completed manuscript. It got the ball rolling. I often promise myself not to start something before I finish something else. But that doesn't always work. I'm writing this blog entry in part because I don't want to revise another story I'm working on. I've tried the brute force method using National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), where a writer must write at least 50,000 words in a month. It forces the unnecessary tasks like writing blog entries out of the picture. But even without NaNoWriMo, I'm getting better. I just have to remember that writer's expanse is also a good thing. Because all the stories I have on the table right now--regardless of stage completed--came from writer's prompts.