On this marvellous Black Friday, please welcome to the blog Morgen Bailey, author, editor, tutor, speaker and more things besides. She’s talking about that most dreadful of afflictions, Writer’s Block.
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Thank you so much, Liz, for hosting me today.
Where do you get your ideas?
This is a question that aspiring writers invariably ask and established authors dread being asked, or so they’ve told me. For most of us – I’ve been a writer (on and off) for twenty years – ideas are everywhere, but what do you do if they just don’t leap out at you?
You look in newspapers: you can write about the main news story of the day, change the names, location, write it as fiction, and see where it takes you. I often find though that it’s the smaller articles, away from the front few pages, that inspire me the most – the quirky stories that Mark Twain said were “stranger than fiction”. Some are too unbelievable (but I like writing them anyway) and you’ll know when you see them because they will grab you, planting seeds of a plot inside your brain.
You look in magazines: not a lot of difference you might imagine to newspapers, but articles in magazines tend to be more general, not latest events (because invariably they work weeks if not months in advance) but magazines are full of people; real men and women who can become your characters. Locations can become your settings. Agony pages become your dilemmas.
You look out the window: the chances are that your house or apartment overlooks another, so even if you can’t see anyone, you can imagine that they’re there. What are they doing? If they’re just hanging out washing, have them talking to themselves, thinking about something that’s troubling them or a holiday they wish they could afford. This would be a template for a monologue. If you imagine that the phone rings or a visitor calls then there’d be a dialogue. Great practice for dialogue is to write a conversation with no ‘he said’, ‘she said’ etc; just write down what they say and see whether they can keep the conversation going between them. And make the speech authentic; incomplete sentences work well but cut down on the ums and ers. With no description, can the reader still follow what’s happening?
You think of a word: any word. Yes, just one word can set your imagination flowing. Take ‘chicken’ for example. Does it conjure up a dinner you had as a child, or perhaps a story where young boys are egging on a new ‘recruit’ into their gang to carry out a dare as part of his initiation ceremony.
My Writer’s Block Workbook series (currently five plus a volumes 1-4 omnibus) are designed for anyone who struggles with ideas, provide various daily prompts ranging from sentence starts or random words right up to entire story components, with tips each week so, as with Liz’s guides, you feel you have your tutor in the room with you.
However our ideas strike you (or even if you have to lasso them) it’s all about communication. A reader reads your words and creates their world around them. They use their memories to picture your characters. Your Tracy could be a girl – or boy – they knew from school instead of just a name you picked out of your head… or magazine. If the readers turn the page eager to know what happens next then you’ve done your ‘job’ and hopefully, you’ve had as much enjoyment getting the words there.
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Based in Buckinghamshire, England, Morgen Bailey (“Morgen with an E”) is a freelance editor, author, tutor, mentor, blogger, podcaster, WI/U3A speaker, competition judge and former Writer’s Forum magazine Competitive Edge columnist. She also runs a free monthly 50-word competition.
As well as full-length and shorter fiction, Morgen’s 40+ books include writer’s block workbooks, writer’s ideas diaries, and an editing guide.
Morgen has edited over 300 novels, non-fiction books and short stories for publishers and authors directly since 2005.
Having attended many UK conferences and festivals, and hosted workshops at various venues including NAWG Festival (editing), Troubador’s Self-publishing Conference (competitions and podcasting) and WIs/U3As (creative writing), Morgen will be hosting a quarterly festival ‘Self-Pub Fest’ online and in Aylesbury from January 2026.
Before moving to Buckinghamshire, Morgen hosted eleven different writing courses for Northamptonshire County Council’s Adult Learning sector from 2014-2018.
To help other writers, Morgen hosts Zoom spotlights and offers 1:1 mentoring and group workshop sessions.
Website: https://morgenbailey.com
Blog: https://morgenbailey.wordpress.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/morgenwriteruk
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/morgenwriteruk/
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