What Causes Writer’s Block
Ever sat down at your desk, rested your hands on the keys, thought, “Here goes!” and then didn’t move? Of course you have–because it happens to everyone.
Mac OS X has always been hailed as the artist’s operating system. If you are a creative professional, you need a Mac. But one thing the operating system does not get enough credit for are its literary and linguistic capabilities. FREE SHIPPING for Plus Members. Sam’s Club Helps You Save Time. Low Prices on Groceries, Mattresses, Tires, Pharmacy, Optical, Bakery, Floral, & More! Anyway, I know Mac and Win are quite different in terms of finale and its implantation under various OS versions, but I find that, with Win 7, 2014.5 had some improvements over 2014d. However, it also continued many bugs, and even introduced some new ones. So, I too am looking forward to future developments. Click on the 'Download Writer's Blocks' button above to download the Writer's Blocks 5 Setup program and save it to your local hard drive. Navigate to the Writer's Blocks 5 wb5trialsetup.exe file.
The best thing to do when that happens is to start typing anyway. It doesn’t matter what, just get your fingers moving. You may have a scene in mind where your character learns some big life lesson, realizes who her father is, or hears the dire diagnosis from the doctor/witch/oracle/whoever… and you don’t know the best way to get it out, so you do nothing.
I know this feeling all too well. I don’t freeze up on big emotional scenes though. Someone’s about to die? My fingers are flying! I need to lay down clues for something that’s going to happen four chapters later? There’s smoke coming from my keyboard! I need an action scene where there’s a chase, gunfire, and dark alleys? Nothing… absolutely nothing. I can rip your heart out with grief, I can make you laugh, but when it comes to pulse-racing action, I suck.
Those things used to slam me into at least a week of not writing. Now, I know I’ll have to fix everything in edit anyway, so the first draft of my action scenes look something like this:
We ducked into an alley. Dead end. Rustling from dumpster. Cat jumps out. (wait, too cliche-cut). Footsteps coming from the street. Pull gun out. Malia gets my attention and points to fire escape.
All right. You get the idea. It doesn’t matter how bad it sucks or how many times I change my mind. The key is to just write it. Get through the scene and fix it later. Don’t know how to fix it? Ask for help… LATER.
We’ve all heard that first drafts are supposed to suck. So, intellectually we understand it. But, when it comes to actually writing like sh** on purpose just to move forward, it physically hurts.
I would like to add that I too hear a few people talk about how polished their first drafts are. Those people are either lying sacks of (that word I used in the last paragraph) who revise as they go, or they are evil and need to be cast back into the underworld.
That’s one of the manifestations of the dreaded ‘writer’s block.’ I say ‘manifestations’ because what I just described is a symptom, not the disease.
More symptoms are:
- Not knowing what’s going to happen next, so you freeze. That seems to happen more to pantsers… (that was aimed at one person in particular who is going to call me as soon as she gets to this part and chew me out)
- I’ve heard people say they have no story idea–which is beyond my understanding, but there it is.
I could go on forever. But you get the picture. Freezing at the keyboard is painful. It makes us doubt our talent, wonder why we every thought we could tell a story, and why our mother and father bothered to bring our no-good carcasses into the world. But, I have good news. In the case of everyone I’ve ever talked to about this–it’s not ‘writer’s block’ that’s the problem. It’s how we view our writing.
Your Words Aren’t Precious!
That’s the disease. That’s the cause for every case of writer’s block I, and everyone I’ve spoke about it with, have ever had. We all want our every word to be gold. We don’t want to waste our time taking our story in a direction we will have to change later. We want our every word to be saved for posterity like little golden nuggets of genius. Or, sometimes we only have thirty minutes a day to write and we really have to make them count. Either way…
If we aren’t writing, that’s when we really suck!
And, I have a cure. The doctor is here with the medicine. Unfortunately, it’s not orange flavored and won’t make you a little high. It’s more like a shot with a big needle, followed by a horse pill–but I swear on the graves of all my favorite authors (even the ones who aren’t dead yet), it will work!
Now, there’s a lot of woo in The Artist’s Way. I know she couches everything to make it more palatable to those of us who don’t believe in a ‘universal creative power,’ but it still permeates the books and I have friends who refuse to make it past week two of the program. They’re missing out on the one thing that will kill writer’s block forever. I’ve taken one of the exercises from The Artist’s Way, added one little twist, and I haven’t been stuck since.
You may have heard of the Morning Pages. One of Cameron’s exercises is to sit down every morning and free-hand three pages of anything and everything. A pen and paper brain dump. It’s amazingly freeing, but one little thing makes it even more freeing.
Adding one little step that takes one second a month will help you feel okay about taking your story in an unexpected direction that you may not end up using (aka. exploring). It will make you okay with writing your first draft quickly. It will kill writer’s block forever.
Filling out three pages of one of those goofy, black and white composition books (sometimes you can catch them on a ‘back to school’ sale at the Dollar Store $.10 each) takes a little less than twenty minutes. You can fit that into your morning. Actually, you should look into Elrod’s Miracle Morning for Writers and work it into that routine… but that’s a post for another time.
Those notebooks have 100 pages, so for 33 days, write three pages every morning. It doesn’t matter what you write. How was your day? What are you going to cook for dinner? How angry/happy/ambivalent are you about whatever happened whenever? It doesn’t matter what you write. That’s Cameron’s Morning Pages, and they are awesome, stimulating, motivating… every good ‘ing you can think of. But, she left off one step that I think writers need. The one thing that will free you up to explore without limits in whatever world you are writing in.
When you fill up a notebook… THROW IT AWAY.
If you want to lay on your canopy bed, listen to Joni Mitchell, and write flowery, permanent words in a diary, that’s great… but that’s separate from this. (And don’t think I’m disparaging Joni. I make Alexa put Both Sides Now on repeat pretty often.)
And don’t think I don’t know you. When you saw the words “throw it away,” you recoiled in horror. If you cut a paragraph from a story, I know you keep it somewhere. Hell, in every single story or book I write, there’s a ‘remnants’ folder in the research section of my Scrivener file. That’s fine and normal. But, if you want to be free. If you never want to suffer from crippling writer’s block again, learning that it’s okay to not be perfect, that your words aren’t precious and there aren’t a finite number of them is the one thing that will do that. And, what I’m telling you to do is the quickest way.
Once a month, tossing a hundred handwritten pages in the garbage will kill writer’s block. I swear. Isz 2 concept models mac os.
Recent Developments
For discussion on the latest changes to Charles, please see Karl’s blog.
Charles 4.6.1 released to fix Dark Mode support on macOS Read more.
Charles 4.6 released including new features and stability improvements. Read more.
Charles 4.5.6 released with minor bug fixes and patched security vulnerability. Read more.
Charles 4.5.5 released including bug fixes for SSL certificate imports. Read more.
Charles 4.5.2 released including new features, bug fixes and improvements. Read more.
Charles 4.2.8 released with minor bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 4.2.7 released with minor bug fixes and improvements. Read more.
Charles Security Bulletin for a local privilege escalation in Charles 4.2 and 3.12.1 and earlier. Read more.
Charles 4.2.5 released with major bug fixes and minor improvements. Read more.
Charles for iOS released. Read more.
Charles 4.2.1 released with important bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 4.2 released with major new TLS debugging capability, minor improvements and bug fixes including macOS High Sierra support. Read more.
Charles 4.1.4 released with minor improvements and bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 4.1.3 released including Brotli compression support and other minor bug fixes and improvements. Read more.
Charles 4.1.2 released with bug fixes and minor improvements. Read more.
Charles 4.1.1 released with bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 4.1 released including major new features and bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 4.0.2 released including bug fixes and minor improvements. Read more.
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Charles 3.11.6 released with support for macOS Sierra and minor bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 4 released featuring HTTP 2, IPv6 and improved look and feel. Read more.
Charles 3.11.5 released including minor bug fixes; especially fixes SSL certificate installation on Android. Read more.
Charles 3.11.4 released with support for ATS on iOS 9 and crash fixes for older versions of Mac OS X. Read more.
Charles v3.11.3 released including bug fixes and minor improvements. Read more.
Charles v3.11.2 released with SSL and Websockets improvements. Read more.
Charles 3.11 released including major new features. Read more.
Charles 3.10.2 released with bug fixes and improvements. Read more.
Charles 3.10.1 released with minor bug fixes. Read more.
Writers Block (tobias Bruch) Mac Os X
Charles 3.10 released with improved SSL (new SSL CA certificate install required), major new features and improvements. Read more.
Charles v3.9.3 released with improvements to SSL support, Mac OS X Yosemite support and other minor bug fixes and improvements. Read more.
Charles v3.9.2 released with minor bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 3.9.1 released with minor bug fixes and improvements. Read more.
Charles 3.9 released with major new features and bug fixes, including the ability to 'focus' on hosts so they are separated from the noise. Read more.
Charles 3.8.3 released with support for Mac OS X Mavericks and minor bug fixes. Happy Mavericks Day. Read more.
Charles 3.8.2 released with minor bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 3.8.1 released with minor bug fixes and improvements. Read more.
Charles 3.8 has been released with new features and bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 3.7 has been released. Includes new features, bundled Java runtime (so you don’t need to install Java anymore), and bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 3.7 beta 2 has been released. This changes the SSL signing for Charles on Mac OS X to use Apple's new Developer ID code-signing. Read more.
Charles v3.6.5 released including bug fixes and minor changes. Read more.
Charles v3.6.4 released including major bug fixes and enhancements. Read more.
Charles v3.6.3 released including minor bug fixes. Read more.
Charles v3.6.1 released including minor enhancements and bug fixes. Read more.
Charles v3.6 released including new features, enhancements and bug fixes. New features include HAR and SAZ file import. Read more.
Charles v3.5.2 released including bug fixes and minor new features. Read more.
Charles 3.5.1 released. Minor bug fixes. Read more.
Charles 3.5 released. Major new features, bug fixes and enhancements.
Charles 3.4.1 released. Minor features and bug fixes.
Charles 3.4 released. Major changes especially to SSL.
New website launched. Follow @charlesproxy on Twitter. Say hi in San Francisco when I'm there for WWDC!
Charles 3.3.1 released. Minor new features and bug fixes. Experimental 64 bit Windows support. Read more.
Charles 3.3 released. Major new features. Download
Charles Autoconfiguration add-on for Mozilla Firefox adds support for Firefox 3.1
Charles 3.2.3 released. Minor new features and bug fixes.
Charles 3.2.2 released. Minor new features and bug fixes.
Charles 3.2.1 released. Minor new features and bug fixes.
Charles 3.2 released. Major new features. Release Notes
Charles 3.2 public beta released. Download and more information on my blog.
Charles 3.1.4 released. Bug fixes and minor new features.
Charles Mozilla Firefox add-on updated for compatibility with Firefox 3.0.
Charles 3.1.3 released. Minor bug fixes, minor new features.
- Chart tab now includes charts for sizes, durations and types
- Request & Response can now be displayed combined on one split-panel
- SSL handshake and certificate errors are now displayed in the tree
Charles 3.1.2 released. Minor bug fixes.
Charles 3.1.1 released. Minor bug fixes.
Charles 3.1 released.
Charles 3.0.4 released. Fixes SSL bug on Java 1.4.
Charles 3.0.3 re-released. Fixes launch bug on computers that haven't used Charles before.
Charles 3.0.3 released. Various improvements and minor bug fixes.
Charles 3.0.2 released. Minor bug fixes and improvements.
Charles 3.0.1 released. Nautical nonsense beta mac os. Minor bug fixes.
Charles 3.0 released. Major new features and improvements
Charles 3.0 public beta released.
Charles v2.6.4 release. Minor bug fixes:
- IBM JDK compatibility
- Improved malformed Referer header support
Charles v2.6.3 release. Minor bug fixes:
- Fixed Port Forwarding fault introduced in v2.6.2
Charles v2.6.2 release. Major improvements and bug fixes including:
- No more recording limits. Large responses are now saved to temporary files, reducing memory usage.
- MTU support in the throttle settings
- AMF3 / Flex 2 bug fixes
Charles v2.6.1 release. Minor bug fixes and improvements:
- SOAP information visible while response is still loading
- AMF3 externalizable object parsing regression fixed
- AMF view for AMF3/Flex messages simplified to hide Flex implementation details
Charles v2.6 release. Major improvements and bug fixes including:
- Major UI overhaul
- JSON and JSON-RPC support
- SOAP support
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Charles v2.5 release. Major improvements and bug fixes including:
- Major UI improvements
- Support for new filetypes including FLV
- Major improvements to AMF / Flash remoting viewer
- Thank you to everyone who made suggestions and participated in the long testing process.
Charles v2.4.2 release. Minor improvements and bug fixes including:
- Support for request body compression (used by web services)
- Fix for parsing of AMFPHP responses
- Improvements to AMF viewer
Charles v2.4.1 release. Minor improvements and bug fixes including:
- Firefox extension improved
- AMF 0 and AMF 3 parsing improved
- Look and Feel changes to give a greater (and more consistent) range of font sizes in the Charles look and feel
- SSL error reporting improved when a connection cannot be made to a remote host
- Port Forwarding tool and Reverse Proxy tool re-bind exception fixed
Charles v2.4 release. Major new features, improvements and bug fixes including:
- AMF 3 support
- SSL support for IBM JDK (thanks to Lance Bader for helping solve this)
- Automatic Update Checking
- Documentation wiki open to public
Charles v2.3 release. Major improvements and bug fixes including:
- Proxy implementation improvements including better handling of keep-alive connections
- SOCKS proxy added, so any SOCKSified application can now run through Charles
- External proxies configuration improvements including authentication
- Flash Remoting / AMF viewer improvements
- Dynamic proxy port support, for multiuser systems
Charles v2.2.1 release. Minor improvements and bug fixes including:
- Further improved Firefox proxy configuration
- Port Forwarding enhancements including port ranges and UDP forwarding
- Bug fixes for Reverse Proxy and AMF viewer
Charles v2.2 released. Major enhancements and bug fixes including:
- Improved Firefox proxy configuration
- XML viewer improvements
- Line numbers displayed in ASCII viewer
Charles v2.1 released. Major new features and enhancements including:
- Automatic Firefox proxy configuration
- Formatted form posts and query string information
- Parsing of SWF and AMF (Flash Remoting) binary formats
Writer's Block (tobias Bruch) Mac Os Pro
Charles v2.0 released. Major enhancements and improvements.