Photo by Abi Skipp , via Flickr Each of us knows the pain. We sit at our desk/dining table/log in the woods, inhale, and poise our fingers to tap-dance across our keyboards. Nothing comes. We exhale, crinkle our noses, and reposition our hands. Still nothing. Here are methods which have worked for me. Love them…use them…throw them aside. Have a bath. Words flow. However, if you haven’t brought a pen/paper with you and have it resting on the tub’s edge/handy table, those words will disappears as quickly as the water down the drain. Go for a drive. I learned this technique from a writer-friend. It does work. I talk to myself and talk my way out of the problem. However, use a recording app or something similar. Writing notes and driving is not recommended. I also keep a pad of paper and pen in the car to record sporadic inspirations….once I’ve reached my destination of course! Safety first. Walk. Not an amble or a stroll... a walk. Swing those arms. Turn on that recordin...

Even after writing for years, do you still get stuck with “writer’s block?” What do you do to break through? As a former journalist, having a deadline to meet helps me. I belong to a critique group that meets once a week, so I know I need to bring pages for that. Another tip I’ve learned is to write a scene out of chronological order—write your ending first, or maybe you know what you want to write somewhere later in the story, but you don’t know how to get from where you are now to that scene. Go ahead a write it. It often will give you ideas of what you need to write to fill in the gaps. Ask yourself 5 'what if' questions. For instance: 1. What if he/she decided to kill someone? 2. What if they won a million dollars? 3. What if they had quadruplets? 4. What if aliens landed in their garden? 5. What if they turned into a frog? Apparently, Stephen King plays a variation of this game called, “Wouldn't it be funny if…” to come up with his horror ideas. In...

www.ct.gov From time to time, every writer contracts a case of Writers’ Block. But Writers’ Block is not a disease, something that you “catch” that will go away after you pamper yourself, take Vitamin C, and postpone activity until it’s over. Writer’s Block is really just another name for fear. This doesn’t mean Writers’ Block isn’t real – of course it is. Writers’ Block is like a boulder damming up a flowing river. The boulder is real. The water can’t flow smoothly until something is done about that boulder. You have to move it or find a way around it. In other words, you have to do some work. We want things to be easy. We think if our writing flows easily, it must be “right”, or if you are spiritually inclined, even god-directed. And if we are having trouble, if we have to write the same paragraph twelve times over, that somehow means the writing is not as good, that we’re doing something wrong, that maybe it’s not “meant to be.” This is not necessarily true. Not ev...

What do you do when you feel like you are "at the end of your rope," with no more to give? Writer and artist Julia Cameron writes in The Artist's Way that each of us has a well or a reservoir of energy and creativity that we are continually drawing from in dealing with the stresses and the demands of our lives. But if we are always taking something out, we will eventually run dry. That's where I have been many times. When I still lived in Washington, after writing my first two novels, intense marketing, traveling, taking care of my home, hubby, and cat, as well as my various writing groups, and completing numerous editing jobs, I suddenly found my well dry. Even though the sun was shining (and that usually gives me lots of energy), I had no energy, no ambition, no creativity and no desire to do anything or go anywhere. So I took an afternoon off, drove to my favorite beach park on Puget Sound and just sat by the water. I watched the seagulls swooping and fighting...

Here’s a tip I got from Natalie Goldberg about what to do when you stare at the blank screen or paper and can’t think of anything to write. Write for five minutes, or two pages, or whatever metric appeals to you, and start every sentence with “I want to write about …” and let your hand fill in the rest. She recommends you do this exercise in longhand, so that’s what I do. Trust me, your mind hates sentences with subjects and no predicates. It will fill something in, and then you too will know. Here’s what I wrote the last time this happened to me: I want to write about big meaningful stuff that shouts “Wisdom! Wisdom! Get Your Red Hot Wisdom Here!” I want to write about how we’re all swamped by our own loneliness and how joy and fear co-exist, living together in a too-small overstuffed apartment in my head. I want to write about how life calls for courage, we have no choice but to be courageous or die. I want to write about my cat using the couch as a scratching post even though she...

Flash fiction can be even better than journaling for working through writer’s block. Creativity and imagination require an open mind ready to receive new ideas and play with them. Many of our feelings and reactions to a situation (even a fictional one) can shut this valve off, often when we most need a creative response. Sometimes the very reason we experience a block is due to an ingrained and conditioned aversion to digging too deeply into something we don’t understand. You may be writing well when suddenly a character confronts you with a behaviour you don’t want to write about. Perhaps it’s your own behaviour, but it may be that of someone close to you, or someone who has hurt you. Flash fiction is an ideal vehicle for exploring your feelings about behaviours that you were told were acceptable but are not, or vice versa. Let your characters explore subjects for you. Prejudice, insecurity, fear, misconception and misunderstanding, rules and religious laws, jealousy, resentment, ...

I suppose all writers deal with writer's block from time to time, but I admit it's been decades since I've had the problem. Perhaps writing a boring paper during college was my last experience? I really don't remember. I've had systems in place forever to get me beyond the blank page. Here are a few of them: Journal Blog Draw Knit Bake Clean Any of these less "important" activities tended to divert my stressed attention enough to return to writing and suddenly have the words flow. That is until the past few months when my wrists started aching so badly, I could barely type. The pain was constant, nights were the worst, and resulted in a total lack of words, ideas, or enthusiasm for the act of putting words to paper or screen. You can easily see that my usual methods of getting rid of blockage only added to the physical problems. It I couldn't comfortably type, it wasn't likely I'd be doing much knitting. So now what? Obviously I have t...