Using Writing Exercises to Overcome Writer’s Block
For just about all of us writers, writer’s block is one of those black cloud gremlins that hovers about from time to time. Many kinds of gremlins lurk in the shadows, including the:
- I can’t do it gremlin
- I don’t know what to write about gremlin
- I’m too busy gremlin
- I don’t have big enough chunks of time gremlin
- I got bad writing grades in school gremlin
And the list goes on. If you can’t see yourself in any of these, I’m sure you have one or two gremlins of your own lurking about.
Here are a few writing exercises you can try to send those little critters off into the abyss to which they belong.
- Set your timer for 5 minutes and complete this thought: The phone rang, and somehow, I knew. I waited until the fourth ring before saying a tentative hello. I dropped the phone like it was a burning coal and began to scream when he told me…
- Take your current topic and condense it into no less than two words and no more than five. On a blank sheet of paper, put these words in a circle in the center of the page. Then in smaller bubbles that connect directly to the main one, answer who, what, when, where, how, and when. This exercise gives you a visual representation of your topic. It doesn’t matter whether you are working with fiction or non-fiction.
- Set up a Google alert on your topic. Experiment with keywords until you get the kind of results that will helpful and/or inspiring for your topic. I have quite a few Google alerts on a variety of topics and I find that getting these daily digests inspires and informs me for my current writing topics.
- Go to your local library. I can get lost for hours in my local library. I peruse the fiction, non-fiction, DVDs, and magazines. I always check out more stuff than I can possibly read in the allotted time and I am always raring to go to get to my own writing.
- Peruse Amazon books. This has a similar effect as item 4, but can get expensive if you give in to your lusts as I, unfortunately, often do
If you are in the middle of a gremlin invasion, try some or all of these ideas and do let me know how they work for you.