From a mail I sent a while ago:
You know, I know quite a few writers who can’t write. I don’t mean people who want to write, or people who’d like to be writers. I don’t mean those that just think they are, or are willing but unable. (That ten to the dozen.) I mean, in the blood, to the core, talented writers who will bring us something culturally valuable sooner or later. With these things, the writing blocks, sometimes it can be fixed, sometimes you just have to wait it out, like being pregnant. The hard bit is not the words on the page, but readiness of the soul. Oh, and then a dose of bloody determination and work. There’s no easy way and everyone is so different.
Try this: Who are you to direct your characters? That ain’t your business. What you want – in the conventional conscious sense of it – is immaterial. Yours is to listen, so very carefully, and then discern (through your experience) what is noise and what is story. What’s true and false; real, unreal. But previous even to this, yours is to let them be alive and scream and spit, or sing or cry – within you somewhere. The page is not important until those creatures are hammering on you to say this. Then you’re not directing them, they are directing you; you’re just copying it out. Eventually, you have all the pieces in place; the story is given to you. Your job becomes something else, providing the characters everything they need when they’re out there in the world. Then that’s a different kind of problem – but that, the mechanics, (the wheres, whens and hows &c.) will become quite obvious to a keen mind like yours. Deal with that later. Finally, there is the linguistics or poetry, or the paragraph or the page, but that’s the most trivial element of all – but we all forget it too readily. We get confused. We worry. We push instead of pull. We stop listening and start talking. This is often at the core of writer’s block.
It’s kinda zen, therefore. You let go of everything else. You listen to that one (I would call it a colour as my head is wired like that) in your heart that is desperate to be heard. (It is a thrill, an urge, an anger, a desire.) You worry about nothing other than noticing it. That colour might be a fragment of narrative, or a personality, or a concept or sensation, or a statement. You notice that and let it grow. And again. And so on. Then you’re not sat there trying to push something out – it’s fucking off – pulling you along behind. You’re there running along to keep up with it! – If you’re gunna direct, direct when the play has been ‘written’, and then you whip them bitch words right into line.
It’s helpful to discern the difference between difficult and difficult. Because one is good and necessary, the other is fruitless and unnecessary. One is the arduous labour of hewing stone to form the sculpture just so. It’s the sitting there on your arse, all geeky and antisocia, for enough hours to get anything done. The other is pushing on the ‘pull’ door; and you’re doing something wrong.
So, you know this. Some writers prepare carefully all their chapters, others just get on going and have no idea what’s going to happen. (Or various other ways…) Some hear characters speaking, others feel what they feel and try to find their voice. Work out how you ride. I’ve found a bit of everything is working for me. Whatever method, I suspect the best thing we can do as writers, at least in the pregnancy, is to step out the fucking way, you know?