Advice for Overcoming Writer’s Block (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Advice for Overcoming Writer’s Block (2016)

vulture.com

101 pointssieste29 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20220518195424/https://www.vultu...

This is just a reposting of something originally posted on Reddit. It took me a while to dig through Reddit’s interface, and the link from Vulture to Internet Archive to new Reddit to old Reddit. What a fucking mess. But you can read the original comment here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5azrwi/im_dan_harmon_...

Well that's certainly one way to overcome it.

Even though I'm a software engineer, I had the opportunity to study literature and practice writing under some remarkably amazing teachers and professors.

Now, at fifty, I regularly practice that skill and it's served me quite well. The process for me starts with a strong realization, feeling or epiphany. The exercise, then, is to take that thought and scaffold it with words so that the entire thought is clearly understandable by anyone (and hopefully expressed with some cleverness).

As David Lynch said, if you sit really still, those big ideas deep down there will start to surface and it's your job to make them real. They want to be something.

Jason-Phillips. IMHO what you wrote is the best writing or creative advice I've ever read.

A very successful screenwriter that I saw interviewed once said, “my goal is simply to write 10 bad pages every day.”

Stephen King writes 6 pages a day. Here's him talking about it with George R. R. Martin https://youtu.be/xR7XMkjDGw0

Ahh GRRM, the patron saint of procrastinators :D

I just realised that all of the Expanse books (9 + a bunch of novellas) AND the full 6 season TV show were written and released during the time GRRM has tried to write one damn book.

And now that the GoT series went down the hill so fast that it's used as an example of something disappearing from the zeitgeist surprisingly fast, people don't even care about the books anymore - because the chance of getting the whole series finished is nearing 0.

>And now that the GoT series went down the hill so fast that it's used as an example of something disappearing from the zeitgeist surprisingly fast

It looks to me like every season was more popular than the last[1]. Do you mean that just the end of the last season was bad, and it was so bad that people immediately stopped talking about it when it finished?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Game_of_Thrones_episod...

The quality of show declined as soon as the book material ran out but at the same time it was good enough for it to still grow in popularity. But yes, the last season / ending was so badly received that it irreparably damaged the show's legacy.

Yeah, IIRC the show runners were contracted to do a star wars movie... They wanted to wrap up GoT and move on to that.

Sadly, I think their failure to finish GoT properly screwed their star wars movie ambition too....

Edit: spelling

> Sadly, I think their failure to finish GoT properly screwed their star wars movie ambition too....

Why being sad about it? Seems like a proper punishment.

For them I guess ...

The quality of the story, yes, but the filmmaking (and each episode _was_ a film by the end) got better. Someday I can hope that they do a writer’s cut, right after Martin’s contracted writer finishes the books. That was a damn good show for the most part.

> Do you mean that just the end of the last season was bad, and it was so bad that people immediately stopped talking about it when it finished?

I never watched the show, but the conversations my friends had about its last season match the conclusions of Lindsay Ellis' second video about GOT[1], namely, "yes, the ending has ruined it all". As she puts it:

> What is the legacy of GOT going to be? Because there are endings that ruin a story in hindsight. I used to watch and rewatch the earlier seasons of the show. But now, knowing how it ends, knowing what they are building towards, knowing how nihilistic and stupid and mean it ends up being, there is just no enjoyment in the journey even anymore. Even in the very long process of making these two episodes, rewatching old GOT was just an exercise in frustration because you know now that the buildup that they are going towards has little or no payoff.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGr0NRx3TKU

> Do you mean that just the end of the last season was bad, and it was so bad that people immediately stopped talking about it when it finished?

Exactly this. Pretty much no other show has disappeared so completely from the zeitgest after it was over. People are actively not talking about it and aren't recommending it to their friends because of how very very very bad the last 1-2 seasons were.

Regular fans without meta knowledge got pissed about the bad and ill-fitting ending to their favourite story. The one that they had watch-parties for and theoretised with their friends between episodes. Even during COVID lockdowns when everyone had watched everything on every streaming platform, no-one bothered to rewatch Game of Thrones.

Mega-fans knew the behind the scene things. Like the fact that HBO was literally throwing money at Benioff & Weiss to make two more seasons in order to finish the story according to the original plan they agreed with and GRRM approved. But they wanted to go make a Star Wars trilogy instead so they rushed the ending. Which went so badly that Disney dropped them from the planned SW project. Now they're doing a Three Body Problem TV show for Tencent, because no western studio would hire them.

To be fair, GRRM has written multiple books during this time period. He's not cranking out .25 pages a day. He's just not writing the book everyone wants him to write.

Yes, but it's also a 3-4 hour block if memory serves.

There is also the idea of “Morning Pages” by Julia Cameron:

https://juliacameronlive.com/basic-tools/morning-pages/

Just still your inner critic and write 3 pages about anything and everything! Every day. In long hand.

I love how he's basically describing a GAN, incidentally a super apt analogy for how human creativity seems to work more generally...

There’s two things coming to mind:

1) Reminds me of that story about clay sculptures where they focused on quantity on one team and quality on the other. The quantity team produced better art.

2) this applies to startups or anything like that where just doing something and adjusting is more valuable than analysis paralysis

Just start. Get the pen or fingers moving. Write about anything. Stupid, silly, insulting - doesn't matter. Make yourself laugh. The point is to warm up. Just like free-writing, eventually you will get into a flow.

Oh I guess I confused Dan Harmon with Bill Hammack (the Enginnering guy)

It's great advice nonetheless. (I mean, it probably explains some things about R&M but anyway)

The comment hits hard tbh, and I think it applies to any creative endeavour – even coding to an extent when you're new to a domain.

When I block while trying to write, what usually blocks me is the lack of ideas.

I've also heard "get your two shitty pages in a day".

I had writer's block for quite some time. I spent two decades thinking it didn't really exist and was just an excuse, but sure enough it came to bite.

Harmon's advice is excellent.

Dan Harmon also had Excellent advice for apologizing

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