author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

I used to do this in college, every morning:

The exercise I set myself was to write something which filled exactly one page in WordPerfect and had a beginning, middle, and an end. Then I'd revise it just enough to meet the arbitrary length requirement. Most of these vignettes came to about 700 words long. They took about a half-hour to finish (for these standards of "finish"). At the end of the year I'd print them all out and bind them into a chapbook. I'm really proud of those chapbooks.

But, as with all good writing exercises, it's not primarily about having a home-bound chapbook to reread later and say, "See, I used to write some good stuff." The real benefit of a daily process is the process.

I think part of the reason I go through dry spells occasionally is I lose faith in myself, in the process, in writing itself. Sometimes it's more specific than that: Losing faith in my ability to improve a piece of writing, feeling that I've "lost my ear" and can't revise a story without somehow breaking it. Or losing faith in abundance, losing sight of the truth that you can't use it up. That last is what the Daily Story Idea is about.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that writer's block doesn't exist. It does. I suffer from it constantly. It requires consistent, relentless effort to push through it every day. Rewarding effort, but effort nonetheless. But there's a lot of misconceptions, I think, about what writer's block actually is. It's not lack of ideas or unwillingness to do the work. It isn't sitting around waiting for the Muse to visit. It's not "not feeling like it today." It can cause all of these things, but those things are symptoms. The cause is something else entirely.

The cause is fear.

Irrational, unhappy fear. Frustrating fear. Shameful fear, because there's no shortage of self-proclaimed gurus out there proclaiming that "If you were really a writer, this wouldn't be a problem."

Writer's block isn't about being abandoned by the Muse or running out of inspiration. But it can take the form of a paralyzing, perfectionist fear that convinces you that ideas you're coming up with aren't good enough, worthy enough, imbued with enough potential to be the Next Great Internationally Acclaimed Novel.

Work through the fear, and there are story ideas all around, more than you can ever use in a lifetime. ("The Louisiana Steam Equipment Company. That is totally begging for a steampunk alternate universe story set in New Orleans.")

Writer's block isn't about being unable to turn an idea into a new story. But it can be a fear of failure that paralyzes you from even making the attempt, so that you sit and look at that one sentence you've typed out, and you go blank.

Let yourself play through the fear, and suddenly stories come with ease, spinning out of the barest hint of the idea like Rapunzel spinning a gold thread from the humble piles of chaff at her feet. ("In the steampunk alternate universe version of New Orleans, the same steam that voices the calliope on top Creole Queen would power a clockwork construct that played the calliope. And you'd bring that construct to the Steam Equipment Company for repairs. But it would be sentient, like one of the Girl Genius clanks, and it would in fact be the main character of the story, and...")

So I'm doing this Daily Story Idea for all those reasons. I'm reminding myself that one new story idea every day is easy; ideas are an inexhaustible resource. And instead of just writing down a sentence or two and considering myself done, I'm trying to hold myself to few minutes of playing around with that idea. It's a reassuring thing to look back over the last month and see that I can come up with the bare bones of a new story, poem, or novel every day, and indeed I have.

And though the chapbooks back in college weren't the point, they were nice to have. Just as it's nice to have a month's worth of potential stories sitting on my hard drive. I can look at them and say, "Check out all the stuff I could work on this week!" After all, the next commitment I made was to produce a complete rough draft of something every week, and any of these little weekday vignettes could be a head start on next week's assignment.

So that's what that's all about.