Wash Away Writer’s Block with SOAP – Subject

It’s a simple acronym: SOAP.

Subject, Occassion, Audience, Purpose

But it revolutionized the way I write and the way I edit because it begins in the place that gives most writers trouble.

When we have ideas, they are gifts from God. They are manna. They are quail. They words from the muse.

When we don’t have ideas, we call it writer’s block.

SOAP is designed for high school students with writer’s block. That doesn’t mean we professionals can’t learn something from it, though! Some of the best writing tips I know came from high school text books. In fact, if you haven’t read one in awhile, these are great great sources for inspiration. Most of us probably weren’t paying attention in English class, so we didn’t notice how great some of the stories and poems were. But I better stop before I get sidetracked on all the things we can learn from the authors of Beowulf and A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Pride and Prejudice and “Hills Like White Elephants.” (Hey, Story Sensei, that last one is a great source for studying dialogue.)
Back to the point: SOAP prevents writer’s block. And good writing starts with a good subject. In fact, to push the metaphor a bit, the key stone of all writing, the most important block, is the idea itself.

The Subject. Defined simply, it is the thing you are writing about. That may seem obvious, but it will become an important definition to remember later on in the acronym.

If you are writing fiction, your subject is the characters, the setting, and hopefully the plot.

If you are writing non-fiction, your subject is the information you want to share and the stories you will use to share it.

If you are writing poetry, your subject is often the image or the voice. (It should never be some abstract moral! Ahem… in my humble opinion.)

In the next few posts, I’ll link to some good models to think more about your subject as you write. But here’s a secret. The real answers to writer’s block and the inability to find a good subject are right in front of us. They are the stories and images hidden inside every day objects.

Got writer’s block? Get your butt in the chair and start writing about any old subject. You can through it all away later.

In The Writing Life, perhaps the best writing book of all time, Annie Dillard says it like this:

Who will teach me to write? a reader wanted to know.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nevertheless, because acting is better than being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.

And there’s the paradox. We all desperately want to find that subject that is worthy of recording. But the blank page doesn’t care what fills it. It just wants to be filled.

So we write. And write. And write. And write our way into a subject. It’s messy. It’s wasteful even–if we get stuck thinking that our time is money. Our time can also be words. Our time can also be relationships. Our time can also be a gift.

 Note: I’ve been an online identity crisis of sorts as I desert blogger and abandon HillCountryWriter. However, I promise that no matter what my moniker or avatar, Mark Goodyear is still the one writing these words. I’ll post more chapters on Entire Book on a Blog this evening.