5 Strategies to Force Your Way Through Writer’s Block
This article is a part of the November 2018 issue of Transcendence Magazine. Click here to download the full magazine for free!
This happens to every writer. Some days you wake up, brush your teeth, have a coffee and sit in front of your computer with your fingers on your keyboard, thinking. Eyes on the computer screen but mind wandering somewhere else, looking for something worthy of writing. Ten minutes pass, you are sitting in the same position, maybe moved a little bit, yawned as it is early morning and you are a hopeless sleepyhead, but you haven’t got up. You are still sitting on your chair (or whatever it is you are sitting on) looking at the blank screen, your mind hasn’t yet returned from the idea hunt, nor have it got any bird yet.
Then you realize it. You are facing it. That one thing writers everywhere around the word dread to face: Writer’s Block.
But that is no surprise. You saw it coming. What else can you expect from someone who woke up with her mind like a blank canvas painted white over white?
Then, questions start to blossom in your head, like wildflowers that grows on weeds but covers the whole meadow once the spring arrives.
Why am I unable to write?
Is writing much more difficult than I really imagined?
Why is it so hard? Is it because I don’t really like writing?
Am I really a good writer?
Then, you plug it. You pluck these weedy questions before they could get you to the suicidal level of paranoia and self-loathing.
“Don’t waste time waiting for inspiration. Begin, and inspiration will find you.”
– H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Here are some things you could do at this point:
1. Get your butt off the chair and go for a walk.
Get out and observe nature or people or birds or bees or butterflies… Wow, there’s so much out there that might help to get some paint onto that blank canvas in your mind. Right now it doesn’t matter how the paint fills it, it might turn out to be a Pollock, a Picasso, or if you are extremely lucky, a Da Vinci, but that’s okay, right now you just have to get it filled. You can edit out the mess later.
2. But if you are not that inspiration-drawing type, go read a book instead.
“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”
– Alberto Manguel (A Reading Diary).
Always make sure you read more than you write.
3. Do some other — mentally less demanding — work.
Go clean your house. Do something that is work, but won’t require you to think like Einstein.
This actually came from Elsbach (but I found it here). She also adds, “Don’t feel like you have to come up with something creative during that time. If nothing happens, you got something done, that needed to get done anyway. But it often helps people to have those creative leaps.”
4. Change your scene.
If you are writing on a notepad or on your laptop, take it to somewhere else. A change of settings never fails to nudge your creativity. And if the weather permits, why not go outdoors.
5. Talk to someone.
Maybe you need someone to dig out that idea buried deep in you, so go talk to a friend. Conversations always bring out the best ideas in people.
So, these are five strategies that you could use to push through your writer’s block. And remember, you will never make it by self-loathing, taking a break on social media or television and never wait for the right moment to write, don’t procrastinate, such moments will never come. So once you have done one or more of the things said above, get your butt back on the chair, or if you have taken your materials elsewhere for a change of setting, sit there AND WRITE. Because at the end you have to write what you have to write, you have to write your way through the writer’s block. There is no other way. No fairy is going to swing her wand to magically get your words on paper.
So get back and write.
This article first appeared on the Transcendence Magazine:
