Artist's Block

Over the past 10 years I've done a great deal of drawing, but I've also done a great deal of writing. "How much writing?" you might ask. Well...

The file that I use to hold my writing contains 934 files split into 236 folders, and this was all accumulated over a period of about 3 years.

Granted, not all of these are chapters of a story. Some are outlines, a few are just web designs made to paste the stories onto after completion. Even with these removed, certainly not all of the stories are finished, but still, it sums up to a very large amount of writing, with an obvious increase in quality with time.

Having written so much, I am no stranger to artists block. As I am so well acquainted I feel that it would be a good idea to dispel a longstanding rumor about artist's block.

Artists block is not lack of ideas. Artists of any kind will always have some sort of idea floating around their skulls. Artist's block instead describes a lack of ideas that we count as being good or original. It is for this reason why many claim that artist's block does not exist.

All that being said, I'm stuck. I've been stuck for about a week now. Since I'm here, I figure it's a good opportunity to go into deeper depths about artist's block by explaining this particular journey.

Lets start here.

A few months ago I started tossing around an idea about a somewhat brutal superhero manga. I drew my inspirations from a few seinen (stories aimed at men above the age of 18, typically action based) that I had been reading and watching recently.

As I worked on the basic plot and setting, I thought about the problem that I see many times concerning motivations in many of the stories I read. Particularly, I remembered many cases in which villains were villains "just because", and lacked any truly interesting motivation, and therefore were unable to relate to the audience.

In trying to fix this issue, I decided to tell the story primarily from the villains point of view. I also though it would be useful to blur the lines of morality as much as possible in order to prevent myself from giving a too biased focus to either side.

As I continued to write, I looked over my characters and was disappointed to find that my main characters had a critical flaw - they were completely uninteresting. Since I have already completed writing 20 chapters of the story, I had to try to figure out a method for re-writing their character traits without changing critical points of the plot or creating momentary lapses in established characterization. Eventually, I decided that I would have to rewrite.

Before rewriting I decided that it would be a good idea to play around with a few other ideas that might fit well into the plot or help to clear up any future discontinuity. Unfortunately, during this process I lost track and ended up floating in limbo among a mass of ideas, none of which I was interested in. And thus, the artist's block begins.

So what can you do to get rid of artist's block? I suggest you push through it. You never know what you'll find on the other side of the tunnel, but its better than sitting around, so keep digging. Keep thinking about it and trying to write it out and you just may find the solution that you're looking for. A bit a good music can help as well. I can't count the number of times that a lyric has helped me to figure out where to go in a story.

As for this particular case of artists block, it just ended. I decided to reread some old work and found a wonderful place to fit in all of this new material. And so the process continues, taking an idea that was once unappreciated and incorporating it into something a bit more useful and fun.