Sharon Drummond / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

This post first appeared over on Mb4

Recently, I had a small breakdown in my writing life. I think they call it

Now before I hear from the ones who don’t believe in such things, let me say, I’m talking about my own personal stuff here. I feel like it was a block, of a sort, no matter what name you put to it.

Out of this experience, I discovered a few things to do that aided in my attempt to overcome the lack of writing inspiration. For truly, a block is seriously that, a dry, arid land where there are no words. No inspirations.

So, here is a short list of what I’ve done. I hope it helps you.

1. Get into a setting that needs to be written about.
I went to my local park and took a nature walk. I took photographs, and then, I sat down and wrote everything I could remember about the visit. Everything from how the light hit the trees at mid-morning to how the water sluiced when the geese and ducks floated over it.

2. Description of mundane items
I would free-write about silly stuff. For instance, the pen I am holding is a black Bic with a cap that comes off, and from that went into a long passage about pens. This free-writing stuff works, y’all. I discovered a lot more about that pen than even I wanted to know.

3. Experience is a great teacher
I pulled out a journal, not quite filled, and wrote about my first teacher, my first horror movie, my first encounter with loss. You will be amazed at what you’ll remember when you try. This is a good exercise to build emotion into your writing. For how can you write about loss for your character if you don’t know how to write it from your own experience?

This is just a short list, but one, that if you try it, will get you going into the writing chair and keep you there for some time.