“Most of the time when I’m stuck, it’s because I’m trying to get a sentence or a scene to be perfect when it’s too early in the process for perfection. I tell myself
going in nothing’s going to be perfect in the first draft, then I sit refusing to write one more imperfect line. Getting unstuck begins with reminding myself that the first draft is where you get the mistakes out on the page. Perfect comes in later. I write long-hand and on-screen, so sometimes a switch can dislodge a block. I stockpile pages to transcribe for when I need a kick start. Once all that fails, I find something to work on that keeps my head in the piece but leaves a lot of room for mistakes. Something unlikely to make it into a draft. Backstory, dialogue for a scene that I might not use. Things the reader doesn’t need to see but I need to know. I’m a proponent of staying at the desk. Once I’m away from the desk, I’m back in the world of housework and bills and all the things that were conspiring to keep me from sitting down at the desk to begin with.”
—Bob Proehl, author of A Hundred Thousand Worlds (Viking, 2016)
Photo credit: Heather Ainsworth