Tips to Help You Eliminate Your Writer’s Block
Tags: Writing Tips, Writers Block, Writing, Toni Morrison, Publishing

Tips to Help You Eliminate Your Writer’s Block

There’s nothing more frustrating than staring at a blinking cursor on a blank page while your fingers hover over the keyboard. You know what you want to say, but how you’re going to say it is still a big question.

A writer’s block is often more than simply experiencing a lack of inspiration. It can come from an anxiousness to write, a lack of self-motivation, a feeling of inadequacy or an unhealthy amount of self-criticism. All of these are serious issues that should be solved by pushing through and doing one thing: writing. If you have a story to tell, you have to believe that you can tell it. To hopefully make the process a bit easier, we’ve collected some tips that might help you with that.

Create a pre-writing ritual

Something Toni Morrison — who sadly passed away earlier this week — observed, was that it works to perform a ritual every time you start writing. For her, this ritual was waking up before sunrise, making a cup of coffee and drinking it while the first sun rays touched the earth. A friend of hers, she said, would touch a specific item on her desk every time before she started working. Whatever your ritual is, it creates a way for your body and mind to know it’s time to get into “writer’s mode.”

Get rid of distractions

When a whole world is available to explore with the click of a few buttons, it’s really easy to get distracted. A daily tumble down the YouTube/Instagram/Twitter/Facebook hole can cost you hours without noticing. So turn of your WiFi, put your phone in a drawer and move away from the TV. Get rid of that stack of magazines you still need to read and plan a moment to clean your house while you are not trying to write. Create a distraction-free environment so all there is to do is write.

Find inspiration

Sometimes, all your brain needs is a spark of inspiration. Read a book to get a feel of how other authors’ sentences flow, listen to songs to hear how lyricists play with words, or look at paintings to see how painters bring objects to life with the stroke of a brush. Seeing how others have used their creativity to convey emotion might help you see things with fresh eyes.

Do a writing exercise

When you’re experiencing certain pains, a doctor will tell you to push through it, keep moving around and flexing your muscles. That’s what you have to do when you’re in a writing rut. You have to keep writing. If your project feels like it has reached a dead end, leave it for a minute and write about something completely different. Try finding a fun writing prompt, for instance, or do what Ernest Hemingway did and describe an everyday experience in great detail, using all your senses.

Get moving

Go for a walk around the block, head to your local gym or take a swim in a nearby lake. Whatever your preference, get your body in action. Movement is known to clear your mind. So getting your blood pumping will get those creative juices flowing.

Change of scenery

Whether you work in an office or write behind your own desk, at some point, we all need a change of scenery to reset our brain. Find a place that helps to ignite your senses and motivate that brain to push it into gear.

Create a routine

It seems counterintuitive: telling a creative when to be creative. Shouldn’t you wait for creativity to strike? Nope. You should treat writing like any other job and find a routine that works for you. Write around the same time, give yourself a daily word count goal or set a timer. By creating a routine, writing becomes part of your everyday life.

Stop worrying about perfection

Of course we want our writing to be perfect, but when you’re stuck, aiming for perfection is only going to hold you back. If you’re struggling to let every word perfectly encapsulate what you’re trying to say, every sentence flow from the first try, and every chapter make complete sense from start to finish, you’re going to take forever. Instead, try to let go of perfection and just get that first draft on paper. Force yourself to start writing and not stop until you have it. Afterwards, you can always go back to prune, add and tweak.

Do something “normal”

Research has shown that our aha-moments often happen while we’re doing mundane tasks. If you do tasks on “auto pilot” you activate a different part of your brain. The solution to your creative problem might just be there.

Talk about it

Sometimes, there is an idea stuck in your head, dying to get out, but you just can’t find the right words. It could help to ask someone you trust to serve as a sounding board. Explaining your idea to someone else and having them ask questions might give you ideas about how to describe something or where the story should go next. Pro tip: use a recorder and write down notes. We’ve all had that horrible experience of having a breakthrough and not remembering what exactly it was a few minutes later.

Develop your characters

Are you writing fiction? Take a deep-dive into your characters’ lives. Create detailed profiles, backstories, looks, mannerisms and timelines for them. You might not use any of the details you come up with, but it will make you understand them better. This will make you see things more clearly when you’re working on a story. If you know Character A intimately, you’ll have a better grasp of how he or she would act in a certain situation.

Have your own tips for how to combat writer’s block? We would love to hear them. Let us know in the comments.