I Love Dead Ends

Dead ends are usually just the moment before a big breakthrough. If you learn to welcome them instead of dreading them, your creativity will soar.

If compelling writing were easy everybody could do it. If perfect ideas, brilliantly executed would just come to you like that, it would probably be the same for everybody else.

How boring would that be?

Dead ends are not a sign that you are a bad writer or that you did something wrong. They are just a sign that creative writing is not a linear task. It’s more like a puzzle with a million pieces that can fit together in different ways. And if you change one piece, many other pieces change as well.

And it’s you, the writer, who creates these pieces, and with those pieces, the whole picture. Some pieces will fit together immediately, others will not.

If you hit one of those it will feel like an dead end.

But in fact, it’s just part of the creative process. Don’t focus on the fact that you think your stuck (because you’re not). Welcome the fact that you have just found a piece of the puzzle that needs a little more time to develop, and therefore, once it is solved, will be brilliant. An opportunity for you to shine.

Imagine this:

You have found a place where you are “stuck”. You carry that part of your story around for two weeks. During those two weeks you come up with different ideas of how to solve the problem, but none of them really fits perfectly. And then, after two weeks suddenly you find the solution. And it’s going to be brilliant. The audience, while reading your book or watching your show/movie doesn’t have two weeks to figure out what might happen. So most likely what you came up with is going to blow them away. It’s going to be totally unexpected.

So?

Next time you’re “stuck”, give yourself permission to stay there for a while (meanwhile you can work on other parts of the story). Celebrated being “stuck”! Be thankful that you’ve just been shown an area that very soon is going to be brilliant.

If you can see it that way, your brain doesn’t focus on “being stuck” but on “becoming brilliant”. This can make all the difference for your creative output.

Learn to love dead ends: