By Jamie Dalton
Writer's block is the bane of all authors existence. It doesn't matter if you are a new author or have been doing it for decades, it still has a habit of sneaking up on us. The trick is figuring out how to work your way out of it. Below are a few practical things you can try to help get the juices flowing again.
Free Writing: I know you've heard this advice over and over again, but hear me out. This can actually be a great opportunity to work on your writing speed while you wait for the words to get flowing. One of my favorite ways to do this is to actually google free typing games and find something that looks like fun. You can then type what they show you to type in the game without having to come up with something totally random to start blabbering on about and work on increasing your typing speed for when the words are flowing smoothly. When inspiration hits, you switch to your work in progress. If it never does, at least it wasn't a wasted day.
Change Your Environment: I am absolutely a mood writer, and a major thing I realized I needed to learn to make being an author really work for me was that it couldn't mean waiting for the mood to hit. Instead, it has to be me setting the mood. When I can, I escape to different coffee shops, libraries, bakeries, gardens with wifi... to sink into the environment more fully. Going somewhere let's me be inspired by the mood of where I am. Throw in some music, food, a great coffee (or italian soda/hot chocolate) and it truly can help get the words flowing. Can't leave the house? Try setting the mood where you are? Even something as small as creating a playlist (makes for great extra goodies for readers too!) or finding a mood music video on youtube to help write to can really help. As someone who has a young child, I often have to sneak in my writing late at night or early in the morning when she is in bed and it can be so hard to shut down from my to do list to get inspired. That's when I shut off all the lights, have my laptop on my lap on my couch, light a candle or two, maybe grab a snack (as a fantasy writer I love to go for tea and a small plate of cheese, meat and veggies to give tavern vibes) and do what I can to create the vibes for what I am writing that day while shutting out my every day distractions for a bit.
The "What if" Game: I always joke that all of my books start from the idea of "wouldn't it be funny if..." but this is a great way to get the juices flowing mid book too! Try taking one element of your world/book and ask yourself a ridiculous what if question. OK, it doesn't have to be a ridiculous one. But I promise, some of my best ideas have come from that. I let myself go down that rabbit hole and see what happens. Need more inspiration? Do this a few times with different characters, situations, and world elements to see what happens.
Sprints: Again, I know you are absolutely sick of hearing this one, but let's do a quick twist on it. This we will do with the goal of avoiding perfectionism. Of using our superpower of hyper focusing and seeing how much we can do in limited time. Many of us authors don't have long periods of time to write and let's be completely honest, it takes time to sink back into our world so not all of our work time actually gets to be marketing even if it's suppose to be an all writing day. So how do we twist this to help us get our creative juices flowing? - Do you have multiple WIP's? What if you rotated through them with short sprints? Think of it like when you do this with other writers. Everyone starts writing on their own piece of paper and when the timer goes off they rotate and continue from where the previous author left off. Try doing something similar with your own projects and see what sticks and gets things flowing. - What if you did a character perspective shift about the same scenes or same moments? When editing you can pick which one you want to keep if you write more than one POV. It can also help build layers into your scene that you didn't see before. - Try sprint bingo. Find a word or element that you need to write in your next sprint. It can be for a scene for your book or even part of a short story that can be a reader magnet in the future! You never know how it can work into your world later. I'm looking at you mad honey inspiring a major shift in Bound by Honey.
Try writing a dialogue only scene: Sometimes we are stuck because we are thinking about the book as a whole. Focusing on writing only the dialogue of a moment can help us focus on the emotions of our characters and get a good grasp of how our characters are really feeling with the situation. The next sprint you can always go back in and add in body language and scene. Still stuck? What if you instead did a dialogue only conversation with one of your characters about what's going on currently in the book?
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