End Writer’s Block: The Tracy Method

Or, I always find the best way is to just make things up. Luckily, my job allows for that.

 

 

 

You might think that just because you haven’t seen much of me on this blog or Facebook or Twitter that I haven’t been writing, but I have. Oh boy, have I been writing. Just not for you guys, because – and this is awkward to bring up – I’ve yet to receive any cold hard currency from any of you. It’s not really a problem but you’ve no one to blame but yourselves for your position on my list of priorities.

So it’s been a week or something and I had big plans to write a right corker of a post tonight but then I totally forgot what that hilarious idea that I had in the store today was and all of a sudden it’s 10 pm and I’m panicking but then I thought to myself, you know what? You’re a pro. You sometimes write well in excess of 10,000 words in a day about all manner of subjects. If anyone can show other people how to beat writer’s block, it’s you.

The thing is, it’s a method, not a procedure. I can show you what I do, but you’re going to have to extrapolate from that what you should do. If you can’t extrapolate, well, I don’t like to discourage people but you probably need discouraging, as all great writers are excellent at extrapolating.

I really hope extrapolating means what I think it does.

But that’s not important, if you were really good, you’d know what I meant without us having to go by “standard definitions”.

That’s not really the point of this post, so we’ll save my beef with the dictionary for later and just dive right on to my method:

1. Wonder if you can get away with a link up post, decide that it’s against your blogger ethics to come back from a week’s absence with a link up post, save for tomorrow.
2. Read email, go on an emotional rollercoaster of gossip, intrigue and pictures of spider bites. Wonder why you can’t just email all of your readers instead of writing posts for them.
3. Walk around house aimlessly, stand in front of husband and stretch until he notices you, when he asks what’s up tell him “oh nothing” because he really just doesn’t understand how much this blogging business takes from you and if he did, he’d make you stop. It’s like you bleed for it, man until you’re totally dry and still they take, take, take.
4. Wonder if you have the right ingredients to finally perfect the S’muffin/S’morffin recipe. Hope like hell Smitten Kitchen doesn’t steal your idea although really, she probably deserves it more. Hope that when the time is right, you can finally decide on one name.
5. Realize you can’t possibly come up with something until everyone leaves and you can crank up some jamming tunes like Skid Row or something really inspirational like that. It’s like you need to get pumped up and all they want to do is tone you down.
6. Read some more email but by now it’s well past 10 and everybody is asleep. Wonder if it would be somewhat manipulative to write about your abandonment issues for tonight’s post but realize you couldn’t stand the pain if nobody asked you if you were okay tomorrow.
7. Feel like you’re really tapping into some real emotion here. This is raw. This is powerful.
8. Feel slightest bit depressed when you remember nobody reads you for your raw emotions, only your overcooked chickens.
9. Exult in being a SEO rebel by not linking chickens to your chickens post. Fight the power!
10. Wonder if you could start a movement to get everyone to pronounce it “Say-oh”  so that your SEO song makes sense “Keywords make great anchor text, SEO helps you be number one! All that backlinkings never done! SEO helps you be number one” That so does not work with EssEeeOh, does it?
11. Remember list posts are good for SEO or Scan-o, something like that, and you can’t think of something to write so Bam! List post about Writer’s Block!

Bonus point: Feel just a bit like you’re cheating, like you did back in high school with your “modern free form” poetry. Decide to take the tack that if people don’t understand what you’re trying to do here, they just aren’t ready for you, the miserable sods. Wish somebody would make you a s’muffin/s’morffin.

Tagged as: extrapolation, smorffin, smuffin, the tracy method, writer's block