Marketing
Beat Writer’s Block: Get The Juices Flowing
By Ryan Parlee
Stare intently at screen…Type sentence…Delete sentence.
Stare intently at screen some more.
Twiddle fingers…Listen to music…Type a “better” sentence…Delete it.
Get up from chair… Stretch…Change music…Have a drink (or four thousand).
Sit down again…Stare at screen…Type “even better” sentence…Delete that one, too.
Repeat process again the next day.
Writer’s block. It sucks. And, we’ve all dealt with it at some point in time.
Whether your title is author, copywriter, content creator, blogger, whatever… we’ve all hit that wall, where absolutely nothing good comes out of your fingertips (or pen if you’re old like me.) And that wall? This blogger is running into it right now. I’m talking a full-on, head-first, need-a-seatbelt sort of collision. So, since the purpose of this blog is to discuss different ways to get over the said writer’s block wall, we’ll leave this for some more successful folks. My hope is after reading this, I’ll at least be able to write some sort of conclusion. Maybe.
Maya Angelou
“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try,” said Angelou. “When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.”
Ernest Hemingway
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.”
Dan Brown
“I have gravity boots [to overcome writer’s block]. I hang upside down every day. I realize it sounds strange, but it’s not all that strange. It oxygenates your brain. It helps you see the world in a different perspective.”
John Steinbeck
“Pretend that you’re writing not to your editor or to an audience or to a readership, but to someone close, like your sister, or your mother, or someone that you like.”
Orson Scott Card
“Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on. Writer’s block is never solved by forcing oneself to “write through it,” because you haven’t solved the problem that caused your unconscious mind to rebel against the story, so it still won’t work – for you or for the reader.”
Ted Kosmatka
“When it comes to writer’s block, the only thing that’s ever worked for me is brute force butt-in-chair. You have to make yourself sit there and face the keyboard, no matter how much you don’t want to,” Kosmatka tells Mashable. “Forcing yourself to sit there and write something, anything, will usually get the gears turning again. You might look at what you’ve written and think it’s terrible, but if you know why it’s terrible, then there’s a good chance that you’ll come up with an idea how to fix it.”
All great advice from wise authors, right? And, that conclusion? Think I’ll pick up a pair of these and just hang out for a bit?
