[A guest post from my friend Veselina Dzhingarova, on a pretty popular topic. Isn’t it great when we have friends that can provide us with posts while we are busy writing? Enjoy!]
There’s a healthy debate about the merits of writer’s block and whether it even exists. Writer Jerrold Mundis once offered a course teaching freelance writers and novelists how to avoid getting blocked and then how to get unblocked if they did. Indeed, he wrote a book on the topic even though he himself doesn’t believe in the concept of writer’s block. However, when you have it, you don’t doubt that it’s real!
If you’re stuck in this predicament, then here are a several approaches to try to get out of this frustrating state.
Change Your Setting
One of the best ways to get out of your head and potentially end the inability to write is to take a vacation. Perhaps visit one of the Minnesota resorts which offer a comfortable setting and a swimming pool to relax in giving you time to read quietly or get lost in your thoughts. If you’ve been suffering from an inability to get anything down on paper or via a Word processor, then you may have stopped reading too. Being away, you can safely let your guard down to enjoy other peoples’ writing which you might find inspiring.
The Park Rapids Lake area is popular with locals and visitors from other states who enjoy the biking paths, riding over uneven terrain on an ATV, and the lake access throughout Minnesota. The Itasca State Park with the impressive Mississippi River nearby offers plenty to see and do; it’s considered the best state park in Minnesota and not to be missed. Lose yourself to find yourself once again!
Remove the Mental Obstacles
When you’re trying to write a novel or an impressive article for a national magazine, fear can paralyze you. The thought of writing a 4,000-word piece for a magazine’s editor-in-chief or an 100,000+ word fantasy novel is sometimes too much to get your head around. If you’re not careful, not starting can create enough inertia to paralyze you into a fixed state.
If this is your type of writer’s block, then the best way to handle it is to remove the mental obstacles. Forget about the length of the article or the book. Instead, break it down into sections (or chapters) and then into mini-sections. You can even make bullet points for each section or paragraph. Once this is done and you’ve reviewed it to ensure it’s a satisfactory plan, you can then mentally prepare to write the first small part of it.
When you’re thinking only about completing that section by following the bullet points you’ve already written down, you’re preventing fear from rising up and stopping your actions.
Try Your Hand at Freewriting
Freewriting is another way to get out of writer’s block. Think of this as an exercise just to get yourself to start writing again. It doesn’t really matter what you write, but the process of getting the creative writing juices flowing helps you when you wish to return to your own projects or those of your clients.
Just choose a strong emotion, a story theme, or a place. Sit down and write something about them. It can be anything. The quality doesn’t need to be great and no one is going to see it. When you’re free to write what you like with zero pressure or expectations, it can remove blockages that were holding you back. Make sure you have a quiet place to work that doesn’t have any distractions and if you prefer some background music, then select a piece you like to soothe your anxieties away.
Ultimately, getting out of writer’s block is as much a mental game as anything else. If you’ve suffered from it before and you developed techniques that sometimes helped you escape it, then give them another try. Otherwise, the ideas shared above might solve the problem for you too.
My father used to say that the nights are so clear and silent here in the countryside, you can sit in the courtyard at night and feel like you are floating in space, and you can stretch your hands, and touch the stars.
OK, I’ll start this suggesting you a good book, because … hey, because it’s a good book, and because it’s only right that you can get away from yet another one of my rants with something good.
There was a time, through the 1980s and the early ‘90s, when the five movies based on the Angélique series of novels were regularly shown on the TV, usually in the afternoon, for housewives to watch while doing the chores.
Karavansara 