Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-28597836-20160530123307/@comment-28266772-20160531134310

Ruckus Quantum has it down to perfection. Reading is the best answer.

You can push past writer's block for a short while, but it'll come back time and time again with more tenacity. Eventually, it can rob you of the whole fun you get from writing. Taking a break from writing might help, but even then, you risk never coming back.

That's why reading is the best solution. You should also read critically. This is a bit more than reading in general, and requires that you go out of your way to read analyses and discussions of your favourite works. You need to find sections of a book that you enjoy and put some considerable thought into why you enjoy that part. If something scares you, you need to put time and effort into working out why.

I suffered from writer's block for about four years. What pulled me out of it was the scp wikia - it was a novel approach to writing that made me reconsider some stories that I'd had on the back burner, and made me realize that I could write them without sticking to the traditional prose format of fiction. It wasn't important that a lot of the SCP's themselves are, to put it bluntly, terrible. What mattered is that they had were written in a different format, which made me think about why that format was effective in the first place.

So yeah...read. Other approaches like "plan everything" and "just wing it" are, in my experience, a matter of personal preference which might even change from moment to moment. Sometimes I've written stories just by sitting down and writing without any thought. Other times I've thought about a story for months, even years, before I've written a single word. I don't think there's a single solution, so try them all and hopefully one will work.