Banish Writer’s Block

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Oh, this chapter in Pep Talks for Writers made me smile.  Why did it make me smile?  Oh.. it brought me back to the joy of my Five-Minute-Friday writer’s community.   If you’ve visited my blog any Thursday or Friday you’ll almost always find a post written for them.  I find them fun and…. more importantly, they stimulate my thinking. Stimulated thinking is what helps me to banish writer’s block.

You see Writer’s Block doesn’t have to exist.  You can have moments of not knowing what to write or times when your creativity seems to lag, but if you figure out some tricks you can negate those times.  Every writer needs to have a few of these ideas up their sleeve for when times get a bit ragged in the creativity department. 

Ways to banish Writer’s Block:

• Ray Bradbury would write out list of nouns and see how they connected to each other. 
• Get out in nature, look around and just be out there.
• People watch in a mall or well.. anywhere. 
• Stop allowing yourself to be distracted.. turn off the tv, the cellphone
• Allow yourself to become bored.
• Become physically active.. run, garden, work out, go fishing anything…just get physically busy
• Do something fun… play a game with your kids, build with lego, colour, solve sudoku puzzles etc.
• Go away for a day or weekend, get out of the ordinary.
• Read a book.
• Join a writer’s community and talk with other writers.
• Do some freewriting, either on your own or with other writers.
• Listen to music, perhaps even a type you aren’t in love with.
• Play with letter art, doodling or calligraphy.  Have fun with words artistically.
• Figure out if having a routine helps you to write.
• Get together with a friend either in person or over the phone, perhaps text a good buddy and chat for a while.
• Make a bullet list of ideas or places.   Anything that remotely connects with a character, place or idea. 
• Go to an art museum and muse about what you see in the photos, or wonder about an old coin.
• Walk in a cemetary…not the modern new day ones, but one with graves from the past, and let your curiousity lead you. 
• Read blogs, poetry, good books, bad ones (they might inspire you to do better), cartoons and cereal boxes.  You never know where inspiration might start.
• Have a friend challenge you to write on something.  Currently I’m listening to a book where an author was challenged to write about a lost roman legion and pokemon.   It’s turned out pretty good!
• Use a device like story cubes and pick out three pictures to base a short story on.
• Teach a class or take part in one.
• Spend time with a group of children and just kick ideas around with them about what they are interested in or what questions they have about whatever. 
• Write a letter to yourself, or pretend that a long-lost friend is writing one to you describing their life’s explorations.
• What can you think of?

Writer’s Block is only a problem if you THINK it is a problem.  Don’t let your momentary lack of creativity, or fear, or needing to take a breather be what stops you from writing.  Work around it and just move forward.  Something will click, it always will.  Just go on… stretch a little.  You’ll be glad you did. You will find that you too can banish writer’s block.