Blog Tips #1: Beating Blogger's Block

Well, continually banging your head against said wall rarely produces useful results. Though the bruises can be colorful! (And difficult to explain in some circumstances.) But if you're currently stuck in your writing or have been stuck before and know it could happen again, then perhaps some of my techniques for breaking the block will prove as useful for you as they have for me.

Do everything all at once! Okay, maybe not.

1. Switch topics for a while. I have two frequent topics I usually blog on: Analyze with KIMPLODES! and Secrets of Trapping Pieces. So, I can switch from one to the other for a slight change of pace. That said, both are analysis heavy so I'm overworking my brain's left hemisphere. But one of my alternative topics, How to Cheat at Chess, is a light-hearted, creative set of musings I can always turn to. It cheers me up and refreshes the little gray cells by switching to the right hemisphere for a while. A play on Hercule Poirot's sayings, one might say.
   
   
2. Pay attention to one-offs, notions that pop up at unannounced and unexpected times. You have to be ready when one of them knocks at one of the doors to your creative soul. This particular idea for a blog topic on writer's block popped up during an idle chat with @Jessicamel. When one of these ideas slips across my streaming consciousness I try to immediately create a draft blog placeholder, even if it's just a title. Maybe I'll jot a note on a scrap of paper. Or my hand. Otherwise, those random thoughts and idle daydreams disappear like soap bubbles that float midair for a while, only to pop. So sad, too bad. Given my short-term memory issues, I try to jot something down immediately. That said, once I create that draft blog title, it may sit for months unless it’s really burning to see the light of day. On occasional lucky days, it does happen that I have an idea that is born and flowers into full fruition immediately. Unfortunately, such days are as scarce as chicken's teeth. Or perhaps fortunately if you are one of those people who has thousands of ideas pestering you. If so, lucky you. But, even then, there are only so many hours in a day and if every idea is ready for prime time I cannot imagine how to handle the deluge. Bottom line? I have no ready solutions for those who bear too many ideas that are fully fleshed out 🤯 but find themselves unable to write them all down before they prove evanescent. 😭
   

   

Create Structure to Focus Your Thoughts and to Assist Readers

1. Follow some general guidelines to structure your thoughts. I do not have a written checklist for writing. But for blogs I do follow the site's guidance for Would-be chess.com Top Bloggers that the first paragraph should indicate what you are going to talk about in the remainder of the post. But they (the infamous but anonymous “they”) don’t offer much beyond that in terms of structure.
   
   
2. So, how do I structure my posts? Well, my mental checklist is a bit fuzzy but I'm sure it's formed by my high school language teachers and 26 years in the military. Oversimplified, it falls into three steps. First, tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em. Second, tell ‘em. Third, and last, tell 'em what you told 'em. In other words: Introduction, Discussion, and Summary. That approach does not work for poetry or stories in my opinion, but it’s fine for many topics. WARNING: You might find yourself repeating a cookie-cutter pattern to the point it becomes a cliché. And then your audience might move on to something new and different, even if it ain’t necessarily better.  Change, even incremental, indicates growth and tends to retain eyeballs as folks remain curious about where your efforts are going. So, allow your writing to evolve over time. Experiment a bit. You should be berating yourself if you don't conduct an "Is this boring to read? Has it been done a thousand times before?" check before hitting the "Publish" button.
   
   
3. If you have a general topic area that merits multiple posts, then create a general outline that you can use again and again for the series. I’ve done that for my two primary subject areas, Analyze with KIMPLODES! and Secrets of Trapping Pieces. At the simplest level, I begin the title of each post begins with the relevant subject area and then offers some specifics about the specific area the blog will drill into. For example, Secrets of Trapping Pieces: Balestra's Mate or Analyze with KIMPLODES! An Evans Gambit Game & Puzzles. Then the main body of every post is also structured similarly. For the post on Balestra's mate that meant: a brief, chess.com-preferred introduction discussing the purpose of the blog; a brief discussion of the fact the origin of the mating pattern is a bit shrouded in mystery unlike some patterns such as Boden's mate; some diagrams depicting typical examples of Balestra's mate; and then a series of puzzles in increasing order of difficulty. For each puzzle I provide a biographical snippet for each player. And after the last of the puzzles, I provide links to all my other posts that discuss various aspects of the secrets of trapping pieces. A different structure is applied to the KIMPLODES! blogs, but I'll assume you get the underlying concept. So, I won't go into discussing that structure here and risk boring you to tears. Although insomniacs might appreciate a tome they can sleep on, I don't have the patience to write that long about writer's block.
   
   
4. Shrink the problem space you are trying to solve. Or start from the other end of the problem! Here's an example where I achieved both in one fell swoop! First, some stage setting. My ongoing, first draft of the book Analyze with KIMPLODES! Analysis by and For Humans was giving me fits as I tried to construct a beginning, middle, and end that addressed EVERYTHING about the topic. The uber-outline of outlines, if you will. Sigh, stupid is easy. My breakthrough was to instead focus on analyzing a single game and then creating a set of problems based on that analysis. Much simpler than trying to decide exactly how the totality of the book should be structured. And once I’d done that, an epiphany struck. I realized I could simply replicate the process for additional chapters. Suddenly my outline had an internal, simple structure around which I could build an overall framework, like linking hexagons together. (Why a hexagon instead of boxes you might ask? Because hexagons are the preferred shape for war gamers as it is the same distance between the centers of adjoining hexagons. That geometry can be an enhancing feature for war games. And chess is one of the ultimate wargames, even if I stay away from the variants that use hexes. It's just bad juju to my way of thinking.)
   

   

Sometimes you have to dig a deeper hole. And jump into it.

1. Instead of trying to break a creative block, do some scut work. You might consider inundating yourself with related material until some gestalt finally forms...unless research makes you foam at the mouth. For me, a deep dive works well with research papers. I read related material until I can’t stand it, and then I read even more. I figure that repetitive process is forming tracks in my subconscious. I continue until I finally do have to call it a day (and sometimes a night). At the point of sheer exhaustion, I can rest my head and body, relatively secure that my subconscious will, at least it better, provide some path forward to avoid further abuse of mind, body, and soul.
   
   
2. Conducting research on a specific subarea of your post is another way to dig in. For instance, in my Secrets of Trapping Pieces posts, I started including (part of the evolution process) a short bio for each of the players in the puzzles I present. And sometimes I'll add something about the person who first demonstrated a particular mating pattern. Below I offer a brief sketch of my research process. 

1. 1. For players who wrote books that I own it's easy. I can use the actual books as references since my chess library is well organized by topic. And I know who wrote what as I only have a couple hundred titles on the shelves.
      
      
   2. Web searches. Gosh, how surprising!! Pop in their name, add the key phrase "chess player", and presto! you may have some useful links. The most likely sources to pop up are FIDE, ChessBase, chess.com and Wikipedia entries. There seems to be a wiki entry for almost every GM I've investigated. It’s more interesting if the player has a social presence on the web, but most titled players don’t as of 2024.
      
      
   3. In some instances there is nothing readily available on the web. In that case, I pull up my ChessBase DB (chess.com works great for the site's online games) and look for games the individual played. The ChessBase information can be sorted to look for famous tournaments, opponents, or by ratings to see when an individual reached certain ELO milestones.
      
      
   4. Sometimes the information is effectively nonexistent. So, perhaps I'll make some kind of light-hearted joke. I might suggest they were in a witness protection program, or the reincarnation of the well-known NN who played Greco. Or note that at least they are in the database being examined, unlike me (or NM Bruce Pandolfini for that matter, who apparently never played a FIDE-rated event). Depends on my mood. Sometimes this little creative exercise is enough by itself to break Bonzo's bigger blogging blockade😉.
      

      

And Now for Something Completely Different! (all hail the Flying Circus)

1. Exercise until your brain unlocks because you are focused on the physical and not trying to break through a creative wall. Go read a book on a completely different topic. Or watch a silly show. Or sleep on it. Do housework or yardwork—the desire to flee from such work may be just the incentive your brain needs!
   
   
2. Picture this! Forget the writing and try visualization instead. Sometimes I’ll pop over to an AI tool and simply create potential images for whatever I am trying to write about. That might involve creating images of characters, cities, and worlds (that has definitely helped me in one of the two fantasy trilogies I am writing.) Or I'll create an image of the messages I want to convey, but I'm stuck on the writing side.
   
   
3. Then, of course, there is the approach of just putting your blog/puzzle "characters" into a different setting. In my first chess book, I parlayed the language and feel of: wrestling (lots of cool terms that fit into chess with a twist); the NFL; soccer; no daytime dramas but I should have!; famous stage plays; known and obscure novels and short stories; songs; well-known tv shows; melees for medieval knights (researching castles, warrior bishops, and staged royal tournaments is fun in itself); etc.
   
   
4. Look at the blogs of Top Bloggers (TBs). Their offerings are good brain fertilizer. I might look at something a TB wrote and, after admiring their effort, ask myself what different twist I might have taken to the topic. However, I generally don’t recommend the blogs of titled players as exemplars. For too many factors to go into here.
   

   

How do I get out of here? (not the 1979 Thin Lizzy song)

1. None of the above broke your block? Then try Free writing. Oversimplified, you simply write whatever crosses your mind without regard to structure, punctuation, grammar, or any of that nonsense. I always thought of this as stream of conscious writing but there can be a bit more rigor to it than that. For instance, pick a specific subject to ramble about for 15 minutes, perhaps a type of fruit or politics in your hometown...or family😉. In my opinion, recent permutations of free writing adopt perhaps too much rigor. Julia Cameron’s book The Artists Way "demands" that the author scribble out three pages every morning to get ideas out. Hmm…demands almost always bring out the obstinate contrarian in me. Still, I’m going to try it, just because I don’t mind being a contra-contrarian. Although I'll accompany my scribbling with coffee. And I can always use scissors to create smaller pages.
   
   
2. Change things up! If you’re lucky enough to still have hair, then let it down. It might provide the spark your creativity needed.
   
   a. Go on a mental/physical vacation from writing, preferably somewhere on your bucket list(s).
   
   b. Eat something that horrifies you. Haggis, anyone? Monkey brains? Vegemite? Fried cockroaches? Fried spiders? Ants? Okra?
   
   c. Unless you are a teetotaler, try a new drink. Or return to your youth and drink copious amounts of the kind of cheap beer that you swore you’d never touch again. Perhaps you’ll get to revisit the porcelain idol and renew your vows to never do that again!!
   
   d. Attend the kind of event you’ve never wanted to attend. Whether that’s a political rally, a night at the opera (Paul Morphy did, why not you?), snail racing, a UFC match, a bowling tournament, or some other affair you were never interested in. Try it, you might like it ("Hey, Mikey!" ) Or hate it. Hey, hate has inspired a lot of writings. Not my recommended motivator, but you gotta be you. Well, up to some ill-defined point that this blog is disinclined to attempt to define.
   
   
3. So many roadblocks, some self-imposed. Is this Hotel California? Or is it worse? When I'm in one of my over-the-edge and lost-in-the-woods moments without a clue of how to proceed, then I might search for a translator that turns English into: Klingon, Canterbury Tales English, Shakespearean English, or Latin. For pirate talk, I usually just go with the flow, but they do have online translators! Hey, what can I say? It works for me; it might work for you. There’s probably even a D&D translator. Imagine this. Your opponent sets a trap. You see the trap…and step into it. And the hunted becomes the hunter. Jes’ sayin’. Best of luck on your writing journeys. May the wind always be at your back...and not exiting from there.

 Below is a sample of the type of imagery that sparks my imagination, allowing me to batter down imaginary walls that block my way.