Hi here's parallel fiddauthor anon again!
In the last ask I sent you, you were wondering how the hell I've managed to come up with such good and solid ideas for a fic (don't know about that though, but I'm flattered nonethless π³) well I have to admit that I'm actually kind of a fanfic writer myself too (although I've only ever published just a one single fic on AO3). But I've been suffering from a horrible writer's block for two years now and I literally have no idea how to recover from it! I only managed to write like two 2k-word- fics last year and I'm just not a longfic writer in general. πππ
what i think it really is is y'all put your depth of passion into it and it fires me up. i'm gonna level with you here. i'm a writing professional by trade. i do it full-time in a couple capacities, i've supported writing from the academic to the professional, taught it to everyone from kids to adults of varying first languages...basically this is what i do.
and the one thing i've learned is that to tell a good story your heart needs to be in it, and that's kind of the baseline. frameworks and foundations and outlines and structures are hit-or-miss. leave them to the technical writers and the academy if they aren't working for you. when you tell a story, you are playing, you are putting your heart out on the page, you are inviting the reader into your world. technical proficiency is what it is. some of the best fics i've read have been rife with grammatical errors but the heart is there and that's all i need.
i think i've mentioned this before on this blog, but at least ime, writer's block comes from a couple different places, which i'll run through, in case it helps you or anyone else:
your eyes have upskilled but your hands haven't: you've started to want to write more complex things, and to recognize that you *can,* but the problem is your mind knows what it *should* look like but getting it there is still not something you're quite grasping. in this case, take a prompt that's low-stakes and focus on the feel of it, accept that you may get your desired outcome but poorly, and try to enjoy the process.
you're inspiration-driven: this is a new one for me. this was me for a long time. i couldn't write unless i had that Spark (tm) that was so dire i HAD to get it out on the page. now, obviously, as a professional, i don't have that luxury, so i've had to learn how to get myself writing even without the vicious, burning i have to get this shit down right now or it will fucking consume me feeling. it's not always fun at first, but try treating a prompt as an intellectual exercise and accept that it won't feel as natural. kinktober writing helped with this a lot: i was challenging myself, and ended up with some smaller fics that i don't have an emotional attachment to, but the point was to be fun and sexy, and it worked.
you're framework-driven: this was me in grad school. if this is the case, you're struggling to find solid ground with whatever outline or structure you've come up with. maybe you're just burnt out on this whole planning/brainstorming thing. in which case, my advice is to free-write. you can find some resources about it online; it was a big thing in the 70s lmao but my playwriting prof used it heavily, and it genuinely helped me tackle some of her crazier asks. give yourself permission to write yourself in circles. take a character or a relationship and just babble about it until you've hit a stopping point. i *do* recommend doing this on pen and paper, but keyboard works too; you're looking for looseness, trying to reawaken the less-restricted creativity that gets you from point A to point B in your outline.
essentially, what all my advice boils down to for writer's block ever is: flip your writing process on its head, whatever it usually is. most of the time it's turned out that my writing was headed that way naturally--flip-flopping from one "preferred" process to another--and what i was struggling with was recognizing the shift.
one last bit of advice: you may just be burnt out, in which case you've got to nurture yourself. i've always taught students to try and read as much as, or more than, they write--anything. fanfics, articles, books. and i use the definition "read" loosely. i also mean watching shows, listening to audiobooks/podcasts, etc. but the main key here is activeness. if you usually passively listen to audiobooks on your commute, that isn't necessarily what i mean: i mean engaging with language in a way that requires your active attention and participation. in a way that, preferably, you get so sucked into that you're unable to concentrate on something secondary, like listening to music or knitting lol. for me, physical books work best for this, but YMMV. in any case, i've found in a quantifiable way with my students, it gets them forging stronger pathways for thinking about and noticing language, and that goes a long way!
