Writer’s block…the suffocating and stifling feeling is something that a lot of writers face. For hobbyists, it isn’t as big of an issue as it is for professionals. For writers, imagination and creation are tools of the trade. Should the tools get compromised, the trade automatically gets spent as well.
If you find yourself stuck in your writing process, don’t worry. (That’s actually tip number 1, though. Worrying makes things worse.) In this post, we will be taking a look at some practical tips that you can follow to get over writer’s block and get back to writing your content smoothly.
What Exactly is Writer’s Block?
Before we get to the tips, let’s take a look at what writer’s block actually is.
Writer’s block is basically another word for a blockade of creative juices. If you’re sitting blankly looking at the screen, failing to form words (or even thinking about them, for that matter), you could have a minor case of writer’s block.
We say “minor,” because serious cases can be much more…serious. They could involve anxiety, stress, and even a degree of depression all on top of the temporary inability to write.
Writer’s block can last for some hours or it can get extended to days, weeks, and even months.
The somewhat strange thing about writer’s block is that there is a group of people who don’t even believe it exists. Although we ourselves don’t deny the existence of this condition, we do believe that putting a name tag on it makes it more real and much more of a challenge to overcome.
Someone saying that they can’t think about what to write sounds a lot milder than someone saying they have WRITER’S BLOCK. Anyways, let’s get back to the main point at hand.
Tips for Getting Over Writer’s Block
Here are some practical tips that you can follow to get rid of writer’s block.
Find and Remove Any and All Distractions
It could be the cluttered desk or it could be the overflowing bin sitting in the corner of the room. If you take a look around, you won’t fail to find one or more causes for the constriction in your creativity.
That is why, the first and basic step that you have to take when dealing with writer’s block is addressing any distractions that may be playing a role in it. Here is some stuff that you can try doing:
- Clean the place up. If you are sitting at a desk, clear up the extra stuff and clean it up with a cloth or something. And if you have one at hand, maybe try placing a little trinket or decoration piece on it. Trust us, this sort of stuff helps.
- Check the lighting. Although you may not actively realize it, the lighting around your workstation can play a significant role in deciding your creativity and productivity levels. Sitting in a room with some nice and bright lighting can be a lot better than sitting hunched over your laptop in a dark room.
- Take care of the olfactory factors. That’s just a polite way of saying “Find out if something stinks nearby”.
Judging from the stuff mentioned above, you could have guessed that you pretty much have to ensure that all five of your senses are not burdened in any way.
Of course, there is more to distractions than untidy stuff and bad lighting. The biggest distraction that you will have to deal with is the mobile phone. You could think about writing a little, but then you could get distracted due to the glowing screen of your old iPhone.
That is why you also have to take care of any such ‘electronic’ distractions that may be posing a threat to your concentration. Once you are done removing all such distractions, try focusing on your writing work again and you’ll find things a little easier.
Read Stuff
This is a good tip, and you will find it recommended by a lot of sources online. If you’re feeling stuck in your writing, you can try drawing out your creative juices by reading content written by other people.
Of course, we don’t mean that you should read the content of literally every other writer. You have to be particular about reading some good stuff. Just as nicely written content will have a positive effect on your own creativity, the opposite will be the case if you decide to read the work of an amateur.
Here are some things that you can try reading to overcome writer’s block:
- Academic journal articles and research papers
- Blog posts and articles from popular sources such as Hubspot and Forbes, etc.
- Newspaper articles.
And the like. You can pretty much read anything you want as long as it is written by a professional.
A very common feeling among writers is that when they read something good, they automatically feel the urge to write something like it, if not better. So, this is also something that could help during writer’s block. You could read something nice, and then in a bid to write something better than it, you could forget your creativity blockade.
Use Online Tools
So, when we say “use online tools,” we don’t actually mean using tools like ChatGPT or Jasper to just generate content. That won’t actually help you get rid of writer’s block.
What you can do instead is use an online paraphrasing tool. Paraphrasing tools don’t work like standard content generators. Instead of creating content, they paraphrase existing content to make it look different (and better, in a lot of cases).
So, how can you use this for getting over writer’s block? Well, you can simply take a piece of text that you had written back when your creativity hadn’t gotten dammed up. Then, you can paraphrase that text to get an idea about how it can be differently worded.
This exercise can help you get your creative juices back running.
Of course, to get the most out of this practice, there are a couple of different things that you have to be careful about.
- Firstly, you have to be careful about using a good tool. If you don’t use a good tool, you won’t actually be able to learn anything. You would just look agape at the horrible output provided by it.
- You also have to be careful about the content that you provide to the tool. The more descriptive the content, the more you will be able to learn from the output.
To show you what this gimmick would look like, here is an example of some sample text and its tool-paraphrased version.
There are many daffodils in the field, waving lazily in the breeze as they wait to be picked by the eager hands of the children running towards them from afar.
The sentence above is the original version. Here is the result we got after we used a tool to paraphrase online:
In the image above, you can see how the output contains different words than the one in the input. These types of words and the change in the phraseology can help writers get a boost in their creativity levels.
Conclusion
Having writer’s block can be frustrating and worrying at the same time – especially if you have an ongoing writing project for which you need maximum productivity/creativity.
You can follow the tips mentioned to try and get around this condition. Always remember that all things take time and you shouldn’t expect to just become a literary maven by giving these tips a couple of tries.