Remember that character from Camus' The Plague who kept correcting the same opening sentence of his manuscript, and never got past it? Well, that's me. But you know what helped me? Writing in English.
At this point, I owe you an explanation, however. English is not my first language - Polish is. And yet it was precisely shifting to a second language, one not native to me, that made the process of writing easier for me. Not quicker and involving less effort – it rather became longer and harder for that matter, but emotionally easier.
Like Joseph Grand in The Plague, I would correct the same sentences in Polish over and over. It was as if something in my mind was telling me - 'Shame! It's your mother tongue, Chris, so surely you can write better than what you have here!' And probably sometimes I could, but thinking that meant being stuck in the same paragraphs. Only after shifting to English, I realised that this was what was holding me back.
In Polish, I know at least two words for a ‘torch’, and I could waste my time pondering which one to pick. In English, I just know the word ‘torch’, so I write it and move on. It also takes me more time to put together a sentence in English and so I will often attempt to find a simpler way to phrase it. But perhaps most importantly, I will not look back at the result a hundred times, thinking what others will say (maybe just ten times).
At the risk of stating the obvious, I am not saying that English is simpler than Polish, or that every writer has to abandon writing in their first language, or that an aspiring writer should pick a language in which they know a handful of words. And don't get me wrong – I feel just as much Polish as I used to, and my language gives me joy the way no other language ever will. It’s about me, not the language.
And thus what I do mean is first of all this: you need to identify what is holding you back from writing, or finishing your writing. Chances are that your mental block results, as in my case, from hopelessly striving to be perfect (which none of us will ever be). There is that bar you have set up too high and you afraid to hit it while jumping. Instead, I suggest you find a way around the problem – walk beneath the bar.
Suppose that you are peculiar about proper punctuation, and you keep correcting those commas, dashes, and what-not. It is eating up your creative time and causes you to focus more on those small symbols than on plot or style. Then try to write a paragraph without thinking about punctuation, without pausing to think where a comma should be, and only return to edit it once it is fully written. Imagine for a moment that you are writing in another language – one that doesn’t have any punctuation (apart from full stops, I guess).
But the same may apply to larger challenges. Perhaps you told yourself that you need to write that epic fantasy saga in six volumes, and you won’t be satisfied once you achieve this goal. And yet, another part of you would like to try a short, cozy romance instead. But you’re a man, all of your buddies will chuckle because it's so ‘womanly’, right? So again, imagine you are writing in another language – these words you write are you, they are not womanly or manly.
Secondly, trying out other languages (not just imagining to write in them), even just for bits of writing, is a great exercise. It allows you to look at things like semantics, word flow, or clarity from a different angle.
One of the things you can try it out on is dialogues. If your dialogue lines tend to be lengthy and overdone, try first writing them in one of your second languages – one you know well enough to converse in. What should happen is that you will get dialogue lines that are more brief and more focused on conveying the meaning than on style. Now translate them back into your first language.
Following the above, translating as such is a good way to practice of clarity. A translator has to first of all get the meaning of the original right. Is there a long sentence about which some of your readers complained as being unclear and you don't know why they said so? Try translating it to another language then. Are you having trouble with it? Well, then your readers were probably right.
A radical experiment I once conducted was to write an opening page of a novel in English, and then I invented my own language – well, just the very basics of it, simplest grammar and a handful of words – and translated the page into that language. Since the fictional language had no synonyms, and hardly any words with more than one meaning, upon translation it became clearer which words or phrases in the original version could be confusing for the reader. This was because I had to pick a precise equivalent for each English word, and thus had to realise what exact meaning I intended for it. The translation thus mainly became a process of reviewing the original.
And just in case – no, I am definitely not recommending doing it (any kind of translation) for an entire novel (even though Murakami reportedly does this - he writes the first draft in English, then translates into Japanese). This will likely lead you back to my original problem: too much editing, not enough writing. Try it out for your crucial bits, like the opening page or the most important scenes – or the ones about which your readers are complaining.
And I guess that’s all. Powodzenia w pisaniu!