5 Strategies for Battling Creative Blocks
By: Tom Farr
Tags: Creativity, Productivity, Writing, Writers Block

5 Strategies for Battling Creative Blocks

Photo by christopher lemercier on Unsplash

For four years, writing anything felt like I was trying force a puzzle piece into a place it clearly didn’t fit. Occasionally, I would be struck with a flash of inspiration and write a story or an article, but most of the time, my writing time was spent staring at blank screen, wishing something would come to me. Fortunately, in the last few months, I found some strategies that have helped me get past my creative blocks and produce a lot more writing without waiting on the ever-unreliable spark of inspiration.

1. Capture every idea and look for connections

When I’m facing creative blocks, I usually find it’s because I’m under the impression that I just can’t come up with any ideas, or the ideas I have aren’t that great or original. I found, however, that if I just sit and start writing lists of ideas that come to my head that I have more ideas than I realized. I have a writing notebook in which I spend time every day just writing lists of ideas or questions I have, and by writing down what’s in my head, I start to see connections that inspire new ideas. For example, I write about strategies for teachers about writing instruction in English Language Arts classes on my blog Teaching ELA, and I have a page in my notebook dedicated to questions like this one:

How do I teach my students authentic writing structures beyond the traditional 5-paragraph essay?

This questions got my brain working and led me to ask another question:

How do I teach students to make authentic choices in their writing instead of relying on a formulaic structure?

This led me to think about something I read by one of my favorite storytellers, filmmaker Christopher Nolan, when he said writing is “a controlled release of information,” which implies choices. I thought that definition could be helpful in teaching writing, so I wrote about it.

You see what happened there? If I hadn’t captured the ideas as they came to me, I wouldn’t have had the foundation that sparked other better ideas. We need to spend time generating ideas and write down all of them so that our brains can make connections that lead us to other ideas or questions.

2. Plan ahead to get ahead

Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, it’s a good idea to spend some time before you begin drafting to actually think through what you’re writing and create some sort of outline. This goes back to the idea of writing being a controlled release of information. It would be really helpful to know what information it is that you’re going to be controlling the release of beforehand so that you’re not winging it and having to spend more time revising later.

I have to confess that I don’t always outline something before I write it, but I do more often than not, and I always find that it decreases the amount of time that I spend during the actual drafting stage, and revision feels like much less work.

3. Embrace incremental achievement

One of my biggest struggles I face as a writer is a gnawing sense of needing to complete something every time I sit down to write. In short, it drives me crazy to start a piece and not be able to finish it, so interruptions really get under my skin.

This isn’t as much of a struggle with shorter pieces. Usually, I can sit down to write a 1,000–1,500 word article about Star Wars, for example, with no problem. But with longer pieces, though I want to be a longform storyteller, I have a hard time finding the motivation to start because I can’t see an end in sight. Plus, as a freelance writer, I feel an obligation to focus primarily on the shorter pieces that help me to supplement my income. Case in point: I have the beginning of a screenplay outlined in my notebook that I started six months ago that I’m eager to write, but I haven’t been able to because I feel the need to focus on pieces I can finish in a single sitting. Several story ideas are sitting in my head that I would love to write, but I haven’t because of this struggle.

So I’m learning to be okay with writing a little bit at a time on a project because incremental steps are better than no steps at all. If I write one page of a screenplay a day, for example, I’ll have a completed screenplay in three months as opposed to having nothing more than an idea still sitting in my head and the huge weight of regret at the end of three months.

4. Create the raw material before trying to shape it

Revision is something writers typically hate, but it’s vital to producing your best work. The thing is, though, that if you mix the drafting and revising stages together, tweaking the words and ideas you use as you write, you slow down your productivity. And there’s no guarantee that you’re not going to go back in the end and change everything anyway.

The process of drafting should have a sense of flow to it so that you’re developing your ideas as you’re going. But if you stop to revise something in the middle of drafting, what if you miss out on something unique and compelling that would have come to you in that next paragraph if you had kept going but doesn’t because you stopped to go backward?

Instead of going back to revise as you write, you should commit yourself to avoiding the backspace button at all costs, except maybe to fix spelling. When I’m teaching my students how to write, I always tell them that their best ideas are almost never the ideas they come up with first, so they should get the ideas out so that their minds are open to new and better ideas in the revision stage. I often compare the writing process to a sculptor working with clay. The sculptor is going to create something aesthetically appealing, but he can’t do it out of nothing. He has to have the clay, the raw material, first before he can shape it into something beautiful. I tell my students that a first draft is the raw material from which they’ll shape something unique and powerful for a reader. But they have to create the raw material first.

5. Gamify the process

John August, screenwriter for films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factor and Big Fish, has over 77,000 followers on Twitter, many of which are fellow writers and aspiring professionals. If you follow him, you’ll often see him challenge is followers to a write sprint, a concentrated 60-minute span of time in which you write without stopping and without distractions. It’s an opportunity to feel like you’re a part of a community of writers struggling to get words on the page together, and there’s always time to celebrate after.

The point is producing, and it doesn’t matter how many words you’re able to pump out in that time, but it can be a good idea to time yourself and challenge yourself to write more words that you wrote the last time. Healthy competition with yourself can be very helpful to your productivity.

You can also use a strategy called the Pomodoro Technique, which means setting a timer for 25 minutes and seeing how many words you can get during that time before taking a break and diving back in again.

The reward is the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve produced something that didn’t exist when you started, but feel free to celebrate in your own unique way as well.

Increase your writing productivity

With all of these strategies in place, I’ve fallen in love with writing again, and I hope they’ll help you too.