Writers slay dragons.
We take you down dark alleys alongside unscrupulous characters performing shady deals. We transport you upon spaceships and through portals to untamed worlds filled with fantastic creatures. We introduce you to villains you learn to loathe and others yet you find you love despite yourself. We shove you into the oftentimes reluctant but hopeful arms of muscular heroes or winsome heroines and urge you to love them as if they were your own. Other times, we show you why you should dislike them as much as the villain if not more. We swirl twists and turns into our plots like they are the creamer in our coffee and toy with our characters much as a cat might a mouse. We challenge you to traverse through the deepest, darkest recesses of our minds or, scarier still, your own.
Sometimes, though, we sit in front of our computers and stare numb mindedly and blankly at our screens while wondering why the heck we ever considered giving up our day jobs. In the biz, we call this phenomenon Writer’s Block or Creator’s Constipation.
I used to be afflicted by this almost as often as I’m not anymore. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not a font of imaginative inspiration by any means. I have my dry spells just like anyone else. Fortunately for me, though, I only ever have to cross these deserts while juggling children’s school schedules, extra curriculars, music lessons, doctor appointments, meals, cleaning, and whatever else pops up. In other words, I’m blessed with so much distraction that, by the time inspiration hits, I have few qualms dropping as much as possible to get my thoughts written down. Because of my busy schedule, I just don’t have time anymore for Writer’s Block. Or, rather, I don’t get a chance to experience it as I used to.
For those who are unfortunate enough to have the time, though, there are a few things you can do to help squeeze a little water into the sandy expanse of your minds. Or blood, for you horror writers. Or, for you romance writers…Well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.
If you find your soul being sucked through your eyeballs and plastered against a glaring computer screen or ground mercilessly against the blank page of your favorite notebook, try this first: Step the heck away. Seriously. You are needlessly torturing yourself. It is rare to find inspiration from a flashing cursor or the tip of a pencil or pen no matter how fancy the latter might be. Step away and do something else. Anything else! Sometimes, a change of activity is exactly what you need to jumpstart the ol’ Creativity Cabin between your ears.
If that doesn’t work, try my Watermelon Method. For those of you who were in choir, you might remember mouthing “watermelon” if you couldn’t remember the lyrics. The Watermelon method is the same thing except you type the word “watermelon” into a writing document on your computer or onto that pesky blank page of your notebook. Keep writing “watermelon” over and over until you remember the words. The difference between choir and writing is, at least for me, that the word “watermelon” eventually becomes something else entirely from what I expected and it’s rarely what I hoped it will be. I don’t know about you, I believe something is better than nothing! If you’re lucky, that something might be even better than you hoped.
You could also try what my friend and mentor, the great Tim Marquitz, author of the Demon Squad series, humorously refers to as “Stormbraining”. To me, this is more than simply brainstorming where you just sit about and scribble down ideas from a website offering writing prompts or bounce your plot of the heads of your friends and family who you hope are as into it as you are and not just nodding and smiling while throwing out the first thing they can think of just to appease you. Hey, it happens.
Stormbraining is bigger. It’s an elaborate ploy to get your juices flowing that requires a group of other writers with good senses of humor. I like to do this on Twitter in Spaces. Open a Writers’ Improv Space with a catchy title and invite in the weirdest, coolest, most hyper writers you know. It shouldn’t be hard finding at least two or three of those. We’re everywhere. Trust me, others will follow. To do one of these improvs, all you need to do is have someone throw out two to three characters and a random scene then assign people to their parts and step onto your figurative stage. The more outlandish the scene, the better. The more you laugh, the easier it will be to help your mind relax enough to fill up those empty pages.
If all else fails, go eat a watermelon. At least it will be time well spent. Best wishes on breaking through your block and unclogging your creativity crapper!
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