Writer’s Block

Writer’s block is such an ugly phrase. Like a square of cement is sitting on your shoulders instead of your head. Or maybe inside your head. Like every word you type is going to be your last, and pried out of you by the jaws of life.

Okay, you know the feeling.

Here’s a few tips for chipping away at that old block, and deep sixing it.

Cure Number One: Write something else. A letter to a friend. No friends? A letter to a manufacturer whose product you’ve always enjoyed. A letter to the editor of your local paper, complaining or congratulating.

Sometimes you’ll be working on more than one project and it’s time to switch off.

Sometimes you’re not and it’s time to find one.

If there’s research to be done, do that, and write up your notes.

The trick is to get words down. Any words. Even an evocative version of your grocery list.

It’s called ‘priming the pump.’ Hey, if it works to get water from a dry well, it’ll work to jump start those creative juices, too.

Cure Number Two: Just walk away. Literally, walk. That doesn’t mean drive. Walk around the block, down to the beach, over to the mini-mart to check on those Icee machines. Walk around the kitchen and into the bathroom and down the stairs. Walk around your studio apartment clockwise, then counter clockwise. Give yourself an hour of walking, no matter where you are.

It’s good, easy exercise, which sets a new set of endorphins rushing through you. Sort of peaceful, happy endorphins. That take your mind off your struggle, and take the fact that you mind the struggle in the first place, and ease the sting away for awhile.

You can use other forms of exercise, too. You can pump iron or run laps, or swim laps. Just be careful that you don’t start substituting the physical exercise for the mental. The beauty of walking is that it’s so easy...it’s like putting one foot in front of the other. Or hey, one word in front of the next...see what I mean?

Cure Number Three: Write a bunch of nonsense. Rhymes. A new language that Jar Jar Binks might be studying. Every phrase of high school French you thought you’d forgotten and sure don’t know how to spell.

Get really silly and see how unimportant it is, in the great scheme of things, that you finish that sprawling novel, that restaurant review, that annual report. It’ll take some of the weight off, just realizing how frivolous, and hey, how fun, writing can be. One two, buckle your shoe, three four, you can write some more.

Cure Number Four: The big carrot and the little stick. You write one paragraph, just one paragraph, and you’re free to go read a book, guilt free. Or eat a truffle (chocolate or expensive forest fungus, whichever you’d prefer). Or play soccer with your daughter. Or go bowling with the guy you never met who lives downstairs. Whatever. You wrote the one paragraph, you’re free, guilt free, until nightfall or day break, whichever comes sooner. You have my permission to give yourself permission.

But it’s a trick. Pretty soon you won’t feel like you deserve your reward, unless you write just a little bit more, and then...pretty soon you will deserve it.

Cure Number Five: We’ve touched on it above as part of your “reward challenge,” here on the survivor island built out of thesauruses and imagination. Reading. Yeah, read what some other guy’s done before you. Maybe it’s not as good as you thought, and you’re inspired to do better. Maybe it’s even better than you thought and you’re inspired, period. Maybe it’s so good, you might as well give up and write whatever comes into your head because you’ll never be worthy.

(But secretly you won’t believe that, now will you?)

It’s best to read outside your genre, no matter what you’re writing - no mysteries when you’re solving your own, no romances when you’re deep in your torrid love scene, no biographies of medical titans if you’re researching one, no box office analyses if you’re already analyzing.

It’ll broaden your world to read outside your own box, and you’ll find, however unwillingly, that your mind is opening to new ideas.

And an open mind just shoves that giant concrete writer’s block aside. Smashes the thing into so many tiny pieces, it’s all just a collection of pebbles. And pebbles, well, they’re really easy to just sweep up and throw away. Writer’s Pebbles. It doesn’t sound nearly so daunting now, does it?

Genie Davis is a produced screen and television writer. Her work spans a variety of feature film genres from supernatural thriller to romantic drama, family, teen, mystery, and comedy, including the feature film Losing Hope. She's written on staff for ABC Daytime's Port Charles, TLC's A Personal Story, and for HGTV, PBS, and Discovery. Her novel The Model Man, romantic suspense, was published by Kensington in 2006; Five O'Clock Shadow is just hitting the stores in February '07. Her first novel, the noir Dreamtown, was published by a small press in 2001. She also writes erotic romance under the name Nikki Alton her novella Rodeo Man, August 2006, is a part of Aphrodisia's The Cowboy anthology.