: Re: The psychology of starting a piece of writing I have a problem when it comes to writing (blog posts, stories and novels). It might just be me, but maybe other people have experienced it too?

Every writer must wear two hats, writer and editor. All cases of writer's block, no matter at what part of the process they occur, are because your internal editor is overriding your internal writer. So all solutions to writer's block involve finding a way of circumventing your internal editor.

There are many different psychological tricks people try for this. But, ironically, the most effective advice I ever encountered for solving this issue is physiological. If you write at the time of day when you are usually least alert (morning for night owls, night for early birds), your internal editor goes to sleep, and you can write freely, in a kind of half-dream state. It sounds odd ("this one weird trick!"), but I've found it dramatically increased my rate of production and reduced my writer's block. Nor does there seem to be a noticeable difference in the quality of the writing.

Other potentially useful tricks include: Deliberately writing pages of complete nonsense ("priming the engine"), writing just one paragraph before bed the night before ("breaking the seal"), always leaving off in the middle of a sentence or the middle of an exciting scene ("keeping the engine running"), and starting from a writing prompt or exercise ("cranking the starter").

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: When writing a novel set in Colombia, do you use Spanish for the dialogue? The title says it all. I'm unsure whether to go for the realism of the language or the ease of the reader by using

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: Doing this in-character is actually easier than doing it with the audience. Having characters rationalise answers that "make more sense" is easy, especially in the case of a Norse god walking

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: To what extent can a first person narrative tell someone else's story? I've recently been working on some stories written in the first person from the point of view of what, in the grand scheme

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: When is a lack of long, sophisticated words to describe an otherwise simple concept bad? Reading books of Dan Brown and that sort (pardon my inability to produce any other relevant examples

: Re: The psychology of starting a piece of writing I have a problem when it comes to writing (blog posts, stories and novels). It might just be me, but maybe other people have experienced it too?

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: When writing a novel set in Colombia, do you use Spanish for the dialogue? The title says it all. I'm unsure whether to go for the realism of the language or the ease of the reader by using

: Doing this in-character is actually easier than doing it with the audience. Having characters rationalise answers that "make more sense" is easy, especially in the case of a Norse god walking

: To what extent can a first person narrative tell someone else's story? I've recently been working on some stories written in the first person from the point of view of what, in the grand scheme

: When is a lack of long, sophisticated words to describe an otherwise simple concept bad? Reading books of Dan Brown and that sort (pardon my inability to produce any other relevant examples

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