What to Do When the Words won't Flow
Most, if not all, writers experience times when words misbehave - either fleeing for the coast or arranging themselves in the wrong order, with all the best words hiding at the back, hands in pockets and refusing to co-operate.

So, what do you do?

Unfortunately there is no magic solution. Well there is but you have to be a magician to use it. Instead there are several well-trodden remedies. And like all remedies, some only work for old wives.

Remedy One. The keep writing rule. Like baseball crowds in cornfields - if you write it, those good words will come. It may take some time but that's what second drafts are for. Many writers swear by this, others just swear. Me, I can't do it. I have to be 100% committed to what I'm writing. When I am, the writing flows. I feel the right phrase, words queue up and immolate themselves on the screen. But when I'm not, I almost get an allergic reaction.

Weird but true. If I force myself to write I feel ... wrong. Not exactly nauseous but the emotional equivalent. Suddenly anything is preferable to writing. Cleaning out the litter tray, washing up. And if I keep typing it's so easy to descend into the 'it sucks, I suck, why bother' cycle of writerly despair.

So I clean out the litter tray. My view, and it works for me, is that there's a time to write and a time to clean out litter trays. If the story's good the muse will return and until then why churn out 1000 words of crap a day? The world has enough crap and it's incumbent upon us all to keep our crap footprint small.

That's Remedy Two - take a break until the muse returns. Not good when you're working to deadline or have a muse who takes frequent sabbaticals.

Which brings me to Remedy Three. Analysis. Where has the suckiness come from? Is it the scene you're writing? The characters? I've certainly found this helpful in the past. Go back to the parts of the book you were happy with and work out what went wrong. Writing is as much about deleting as it is creating.

Remedy Four. Move on. Jump forward to a scene you feel happy with and start from there. This gives you plenty of time to come up with a bridging scene in draft two.

Remedy Five. Switch to another project. Most writers will have more than one project - the embryonic idea for the next novel, a short story, an outline, a synopsis. Switch to the project that excites you the most and get back the will to write. That way you stay productive and return to the original project in a better and more objective mood.

For remedies six and up consult your inner psychologist. Paraphrasing Kipling, there are nine and sixty ways of handling writer's block and every one of them is er ... oh sh**, what's the word?