For many decades, I've been helping storytellers overcome problems with particular stories or with their storytelling in general.
Along the way, I've noticed that there are four categories of problems that storytellers commonly face:
Needing information about how storytelling works. For example, it can help storytellers succeed if they notice that a key power of storytelling is to stimulate your listeners to imagine. That act of imagining engages the imagination and emotions of listeners, causing your listeners to participate actively in creating the images and emotions involved. Such active participation is what makes storytelling more powerful than any passive reception of information—and being aware of that can help storytellers take the time to help listeners fully imagine the story’s images.
Needing what I call "more experience of your story." Such experience involves imagining the story ever more fully; gaining a sense of the listeners’ emotional progression through the story; becoming more and more clear about your characters' progressions, or simply perfecting how and when to bring your listeners to experience, say, the story's climax.
Overcoming what I call "misdirected effort": things that you do in the (typically unconscious) belief that they'll help with your story—but that, in fact, interfere instead. A simple example is the use of an artificial "storyteller's voice," which is, fortunately, less common now than 30 years ago, but nonetheless still surfaces sometimes as an artificial, often dramatic tone of voice.
Emotional blocks. Sometimes, for example, a story involves a scene that is emotionally especially painful for me to imagine. As a result, I may be unconsciously unwilling to truly experience what one of my characters is experiencing, so I tell that key scene flatly, or perhaps with an artificial approximation of an emotion that I'm actually unwilling to experience as I tell.
What Do These Kinds of Problems Have to Do with Writer's Block?
Many writers have had small or large experiences, of "writer's block," which leaves them unable to write (perhaps for a few days or, more terrifyingly, for weeks or months).
Fortunately for me, one of my newsletter subscribers forwarded a recent article of mine to a friend, saying, "This describes a course that might help with writer's block."
That piqued my interest, because writer's block hadn't been on my mind when I designed my upcoming course ("How to Grow a Book: and not have to do it alone").
As a result, I began to read about so-called "writer's block." Along the way, I noticed a group of essays that talked about Writer's Block, not as some dread ailment that can simply paralyze you out of the blue, but rather as a sign that something in your writing may need to change!
Wait—I Know About Needing to Change!
After several conversations with other storytellers, I realized that my "Four Categories of Storytelling Obstacles" seem suspiciously like four different forms of "writer's block."
I began to wonder: is "writer's block" actually a generic name for being stuck while facing a storytelling obstacle?
"Writer's block" is often accompanied by having a hard time focusing on writing, or being unable able to imagine what you are writing, or lacking clarity about knowing where your story may need to go next, etc.
If that's the case—and I strongly suspect it is—then we've learned some key things about writer's block and how to overcome it:
Writer's block is simply a symptom of one or more of the four categories of storytelling obstacles—a symptom that we haven't yet known how to address!
If This Turns Out to Be True, Why Might Writers Not Have Noticed This?
One of the perils of writing is that it is typically done alone. It certainly CAN be done alone—and aloneness may, I suspect, make it more difficult to use helping relationships with other writers (and storytellers) as ways to keep from sinking under the weight of our latest difficulties.
Look Beyond This?
Rather than have people simply tell you what they like or don't like, or how they think you should fix your writing, it should be possible to ask your readers to give simpler, less evaluative comments about the effect of your writing on their understanding.
Developing such ways to help readers give less evaluative comments may turn out to be a key step in allowing your readers to give you highly useful feedback on your writing—feedback that reflects what your readers experienced rather than what they think you should have written.