I’ll get back to you on the bling part. (Temporarily blinded by something sparkly.)
Cheyenne McCray
Writer’s block hits authors in different ways. For me, my mind goes completely blank and I want to bang my head against the keyboard to knock some kind of idea loose. Problem with that is it’s hard to replace the keys that pop off.
So, instead of giving myself a different kind of headache, I turn to tools I use to stimulate my creativity. These are my top 4:
Clustering—
I learned this a long time ago in college, but didn’t start using it until a year ago. I could kick myself in the pants for not using it sooner. It’s called clustering, and it’s a technique I learned from Writing the Natural Way by Gabriele Rico, Ph.D. I highly recommend this book. One idea spawns others, each of those spawn more ideas, and so on. I cluster ideas for an entire book, and for each chapter. It’s fascinating and fun.
Handwrite a scene—
One trick that has helped me on occasion is to pick up a notebook and start writing the next scene, or a future scene. There’s something about that brain-hand connection that sets more ideas free.
(Hang in there… getting to the bling…)
Take a writing class—
What, you’ve learned all you can learn? You’d be surprised how one class can turn writer’s block into writer’s sprint. I’m a 17-year writing veteran, published for 15 years, with lots of awards, recognition, big lists, etc. But that doesn’t matter when you’re faced with writer’s block.
I took a class called FreeWrite and it was all about writing prompts. The facilitator would lay thirty items on the table and the ten of us in the class would pick one and write a story from that—we usually had 10-12 minutes to write something. Or he’d do the same with laminated pictures that we could choose from. Another technique was using phrases to start us off, and music was even used one day. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed that class. I was the only published writer, not something I advertised. I was in awe of fellow classmates who wrote deep, meaningful, and thoughtful pieces on their personal lives that were brilliant and amazing. Me, on the other hand—I just made stuff up.
Time for tool #4…and that bling I’ve been hinting at.
Brainstorming with friends and others—
I can be absolutely stuck in the mud, unable to figure out “How do I get from here to there?” I’ll meet with some friends or even Skype with them and we’ll usually break through enough to get going again.
During my time of writing Taking Fire, I was stuck on what to do next, and my significant other, Martin, asked me if he could help. I was skeptical—after all, what does a non-writer know about the stuff I write?
Turns out, a lot.
Martin gave me ideas I would never have thought of. He’d research things on the web, pull up YouTube videos, and made himself quite useful. All without me asking him to do it. He just jumped right in.
Well, I decided I have to keep him. I cannot let this one go! So I now have pretty bling on my ring finger, and a great guy to go along with it. Who’d have thought?
