30 Ways to Beat Writer’s Block
By the East Sierra Branch, CWC
Members of the East Sierra Branch of the California Writers Club based in Ridgecrest, CA, colloquially known as Ridge Writers, pooled together 30 tips, tricks, prompts, inspirations, and more to help battle against the dreaded Writer’s Block. Conquer the blank white page today and start your adventure in writing. Twenty ideas follow. Another 10 will appear next month.
1) Avoid recipes for disaster, like leaving yourself a half hour to write 3000 words.
2) Set realistic goals. With unrealistic goals, you’ll only stress yourself.
3) For incentive, enter a contest.
4) Write something, anything. Keep writing. Then go back and revise.
5) If you can’t get the beginning going, jump ahead to write a later part.
6) Remove distractions.
7) Bargain with yourself, e.g. I can’t have dessert until I finish 20 pages.
8) For incentive, write something you can use in three places, e.g. on a blog, in your branch newsletter, and in your next book.
9) Stop struggling for the perfect word. Use a synonym. The right one will come to you later.
10) “The first novel is a good place to put things that would be awkward to use elsewhere.” – Peter Prescott
11) You can’t force quality. Know what you want to do before you start doing it.
12) A writers’ club can energize you, inspire you, give you guidance and ideas and get creative juices flowing.
13) It takes work. If you just had to slap words on the page, anybody could write. Don’t expect easy automatic writing.
14) Determine your freshest, sharpest time of day and do your work then.
15) Establish a routine and stick to it until it becomes unflagging habit.
16) Instead of chasing down the perfect phrase, ask yourself, “What do I want to say?” Just write that down, however inelegant. You can polish it later.
17) “The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.” – Bernard Malamud
18) Don’t blame yourself. It happens to all writers.
19) Pick a favorite book. Read the first (or last) words from several paragraphs. Rearrange them into a sentence (you don’t have to use all the words). This is your writing prompt!
20) Use a verse or chorus from a pop song as your writing prompt. Think about the protagonist in the lyrics; how did they get to the point that they are singing about?
Check out Showcase next month for another 10 ways.