The only time writer's block matters is if you are writing to some deadline or limitation of topic.
Otherwise, just walk away and do some other stuff that requires doing, brushing teeth, winding clocks, dusting off the door mat - useful things that sometimes don't get done when you are actually writing. When the compulsion to write comes, you won't be able to stop it.
When the feeling of absolute senselessness that is commonly taken as writer's block comes upon you when you are writing under pain of death, then, too, a little break can sometimes help. A cup of tea. A perusal of the newspapers, Going though some material that is connected with the topic. Or even a movie or book break and suddenly what you were missing will come to you.
That's how it works with me.
With others, anything from porn to a joint could be helping - who knows, writers can be eccentric.
I was waitng for that. You little booger you.
We have to remember that the 'rules' as labelled here from Pixar are not actually rules. Rules have to be enforced. With punishment. Though reward can also work.
What punishment would there be if you disregarded every single guideline of Pixar's?
It is basically a 'tip-sheet', a schedule of routines, a foundation for a mind-set, recomendations on writing for a particular marketable audience. Maybe the word 'RULES" in there was some power-grab by whoever edited the head, or a placebo that following them guaranteed success.
niky put it vey well:
While they're nifty rules for screenwriters, it needs to be said:
Movies don't always have to make sense.
That is, movies exist to tell stories and to keep people engaged. Which means that the logical flow of a story will sometimes be sacrificed for the movie to move from Point A to Point B, with both points being inviolable.
The job of a director is to gloss over the fact that sometimes these things don't make sense. But when you're selling a story that has to stand on the written page, naked and shorn of special effects and movie magic, you don't have this luxury.
Still... it's a good list.
But are there
rules to writing? Not just applied to
what you write, but to
how you write?
Oh, yes. And they rarely change - some of the rules going back millennia and still hardly effected by any drift.
Some rules are so simple they are self-evident.
To write, you need replicable symbols. Writing is not shooting a video, or doodling, or hammering out a tattoo.
To write you string together symbols to make a phoneme that stands for some sound, and you then string together several phonemes to make words that stand for concepts, and you then put the concepts together to communicate a larger concept - a message involving all the concepts - but all this with symbols marked on a surface.
The scrawl on the wall is writing. The epic video isn't (though it may start with writing.)
The lettered, pierced heart carved on a tree is writing. A rock song isn't, though it may have been notated first.
The TXT message you sent your friend was writing. The pic that accompanied it wasn't. Though there
may have been something left to the imagination.
The job application you hammered out on the laptop, the obituary you cut and chopped to satisfy, that Presidential speech you laboured nights over, sheet after sheet of marks and symbols, words that called, provoked, yelled promised, soothed, calmed, energized . . . sheet after sheet thrown into the fire, symbols turning to sparks one way or another - that's writing. Comics aren't writing, though a good story is a good start.
Your textual post here is writing. Grabbing a pic off the web and stamping it in here is not writing.
Writing is what we have been doing in this thread - and a lot of great writers in here - but that's natural. A Forum's original premise is to communicate - and writing is the first and most basic way we communicate in here.
That becomes a self-evident 'rule': when you use symbols, written, to communicate, you are writing.
Whether you make an arrow sign in the sand, or inscribe 'they went that-a-way' on a rock, the message is the same - and you used symbols to transmit that message.
Not outrageous pictures, not movies, not songs, not bedtime stories read aloud out of the book. None of that is writing though writing is a good start if you want to express something that way.
Because, the story - the message - the neuronic connections made - the imagination expressed to be imagined by the reader - the ultimately shared connection when communication is 100% - that is where the story functions in its purest form; to amplify consciousness of some reality - to collect the consciousness of all readers and make them one with the mind of the one that wrote.
That's writing. Just symbols, or as we may broadly refer to them: words.
There are no crutches to stand on. No intro music, no visual special effects, no awesome sounds of thunder. No pretty pictures of pouty lips, or glittering cars, or fierce-looking guns. There's nothing to look at - just words. There's nothing to hear but the words in your head.
When you make some symbols in the sand or on papyrus or walls of Pompeii, or your journal, or laptop to reflect that sound in your head, and others can read it and understand, then you've followed the most basic rule ever - the one enforced by being misunderstood or understood - you've written. You have dared to write.
So there are rules to writing - depending on the language you are using as well as the dialect. English has hundreds of dialects - for instance Medical English is not the same as Engineering English. The wrong term could mean life or death. The English of Litigation is so complex one could spend a lifetime 'reading' Law. These are all dialects (and I'm not talking about misplaced allophones
) they are word-specific to the disciplines and some words in normal everyday use mean something else entirely in such technical or academic fields.
The dialect of Twitter, FB, and YouTube are vastly different - though they all use some form of English (and forms of other languages, too) and TXTSPK as a language is as ancient as Hittite cuneiform except they used different marks instead of our English consonants - and they didn't much like vowels, themselves, either.
Writing is simply putting some words together and trying to make someone else imagine it themselves.
So what makes a good writer?
The writer who remembers that a book is only as good as its reader.
Here we go:
The dog jumped over the house.
Now what did you imagine? And why? Does that illustrate how the power of your own imagination is required? How much can the writer do to make the reader work less?
