Writers Block My Solution

Writers block is awful, you sit down eager to continue with your short story, manuscript or novel and all your brain produces is the odd piece of tumble-weed within a vast deserted landscape, the building that once housed the creative life force behind your work exists only as a mirage.

My initial way of responding to writers block was to simply stop go into a Zen state and simply wait for the inspiration for me to continue with my project.

The fear being that if I continued without the inspiration, whatever words were added at that point would serve only to infect what was up to now equivalent to a work of divine creation.

Thing is, you could wait forever for the right inspiration to come along, days, weeks even months and lets face it a writer who doesn’t write, well isn’t a writer.

I came up with two solutions one was to write every day, and that starts with free form which has been covered in my earlier posts, then pick up the manuscript (you know the divine document) and write, even if its terrible drudge, just write, and keep to a word count start with 1000 words per day.

Humans are habitual creatures and you’ll find once you start doing this it will be easier to keep going.

This helped me to write every day but I found the inspiration was still a problem you see my brain is constantly ticking over and whilst one section of my creative self was interested in swimming in deep rivers of shock and horror my other half was simply wanting to make people laugh.

I came up with a project that was the counter balance to all things dark and devious.

This meant I had two projects on the go at the same time, but you can’t do that can you???

I didn’t think so, but it seems to work for me. I tend to find that every day I’m in the mood for one or the other project and I seem to find absence make the heart grow fonder, once I leave one project I can’t wait to get back to it which makes my daily word count rather large.

I’d be very interested to learn from other writers, find out what different methods work for different people so please feel free to leave a comment.

Till next time x