So, your muse has left you (not the best start—mine seems to have left too, but since you opened this page, I’m probably right). You can suffer over this for a long time, fruitlessly study the structure of a blank sheet of paper, and diagnose yourself (“I have writer’s block”), but it’s better to try to break out of this vicious circle by turning everything upside down.
How to overcome writer’s block
There are unusual ways to overcome writer’s block. Here are some of them:
- Choose a new text editor
Sometimes routine is the key to successful creativity, and sometimes it is its grave. If a blank Word document terrifies you, it’s time to get rid of it. Especially since there are many applications for writers and text editors that you don’t yet have negative associations with.
- Change your work schedule
Here’s another tip for breaking out of your routine. Sure, a lot of writers stick to a strict daily schedule: Stephen King, Haruki Murakami, Susan Sontag, and others. But they’ve already figured out how to make their creative process a ritual, and the routine they’ve found or set for themselves helps them get into that special state of mind. If you sit down every day at 10 a.m. in front of a blank sheet of paper, and after a couple of hours there are no meaningful phrases on it, then you have not yet found your ideal creative routine and need to continue experimenting in this area. In addition to changing your work schedule, you can allow yourself other liberties: deviating from your plan, using an unusual place to work, trying to write in an unusual environment, etc.
- Take a walk, pace around the room, wash the dishes, take a shower
Yes, you understood me correctly. Have you ever had sudden flashes of inspiration while taking a shower or simply walking through the woods? These are all similar situations. The fact is that our brain is capable of producing good ideas not when we are extremely focused, but when it is relaxed (and we walk around with constant intellectual spasms and think that this is beneficial to our cause): the brain is freed up and our heads are filled with flashes of insight and innovative ideas, we begin to grasp the essence of things. Walking is a separate story — have you ever wondered why the characters of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, two undisputed pillars of stream-of-consciousness literature, are constantly on the move in their novels (Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in Dublin, Mrs. Dalloway is lost in thought on the streets of London, oblivious to the city)? So stop sitting still and get going. At the very least, wash the dishes. The processes are slightly different in terms of biochemistry, but the result is the same — the brain switches off and the subconscious switches on:
- Swear out loud or write down a few strong words about what you think about all this
Expressing emotions through words is a good exercise for unleashing creative energy. Give free rein to your feelings — hurt, anger, irritation. After all, there is nothing more valuable than genuine human emotions — and only they can resonate with readers. Of course, you will work on what you have written many times, but the most important thing here is the sincerity with which you approached the task. After all, it is possible that after releasing your demons and carnivalizing your text, you will come up with something more life-affirming (or maybe not — remember, creativity is multifaceted).
- Go on a journey
My favorite way. New sights, new people, and new experiences pull us out of our everyday lives and give us the opportunity to look at life from a different angle. You know that impressions are the only thing worth spending time and money on, right?
- Stop being afraid of failure. To hell with mistakes!
The fear of making mistakes is paralyzing — we all know this from experience. Julia Cameron, author of the legendary book The Artist’s Way, believes that it is precisely the fear of failure that gives rise to the “Inner Censor” within us, which blocks our creativity by reminding us of risks and failures and dictating what is right, proven, and safe. Overcoming this “Inner Censor” and curtailing its power is our primary task. Without this, we can spend our whole lives in fear, without ever accomplishing anything.
- Don’t be afraid to borrow and rework other people’s ideas
The idea of creating something new is good, but in many ways it is futile. It is no secret that everything has already been created before us. However, this does not mean that we cannot present old truths in a new light and in a more relevant form. So borrowing ideas (not mindless plagiarism) is a good basis for your own creativity.
- Listen to the sound of rain, the sea, or the wind (or whatever you like).
According to a study by the University of Chicago, average noise levels not only do not interfere with work and creativity, but even have a positive effect on the process and results of activity. But why just noise? It’s better to remember a sound that we really love and, if possible, turn it on. Online background noise generators can help us with this. Fortunately, the range of recorded sounds is incredibly wide: from simple waves crashing on the shore to the ringing of Tibetan bowls.
- Think less about your readers
It’s impossible to please everyone. However, writing for no one is not a very good idea either. That’s why Kurt Vonnegut came up with a universal truth and made it one of the rules of writing a good story: “Write for the pleasure of one person.”
- Set unusual goals for yourself
If you find writing boring, think about how many techniques and artistic devices in literature you have yet to master. Set yourself an unusual goal and spice up your text with something unknown. For example:
- come up with an unusual metaphor related to a specific topic;
- use litotes, metonymy, personification, periphrasis, etc. in your text;
- reduce the volume of what you write by 30-35% (based on your usual volume);
- use ellipsis, zeugma, parallelism, etc.;
- write a text consisting only of verbs (or nouns, or verbs + adverbs), etc.
In general, as you can see, it is possible to overcome writer’s block. Moreover, it is not such a terrible diagnosis — it is just a dead-end state of mind, from which there are a thousand ways out.
