7 Playful Techniques to Shatter Your Writer’s Block

7 Playful Techniques to Shatter Your Writer’s Block: "5. Dive for treasure

Go to a store, any store, that your character feels drawn to, and pick out an object. While pretending to be your character, describe the item with your eyes closed. Feel it all over. Get all the tactile sensations you can. Try rapping it with your fingers or knocking on it to hear the sounds it makes. Lick it if possible. Finally, open your eyes and examine the object. Describe it using all your senses, and then turn it into a story or a poem. Or fit it into a story you’re currently working on. In what way might it play a significant role? If you don’t want to buy anything, go through the stuff in your home, and pick something that appeals to your character.

6. Prognosticate the future

Get out some crayons, colored pencils, markers, or watercolors—whatever you have. Tapping into the visual centers of your brain helps spark your creativity. Draw or paint: stick figures, abstractions, whatever works—to illustrate the kind of life you think your character will be living 10, 20, or 30 years beyond the end of the story you’re writing. Or draw the next scene in your story.

7. Hopscotch through alternate realities

Write out 50 endings or openings for your story. Try radically different plot lines or slight variations. It’ll get you nice and tired. That’s when your brain is most likely to catch fire (figuratively, I hasten to point out). That’s when you’re most likely to let loose with brilliant ideas. So just give yourself a little nudge, and keep going.

Open sesame!

Whenever you feel stale, stagnant, world-weary, and dreary, try one or two of the above techniques, or try them all. Think they’re odd? Skeptical that they’ll work? Consider what Carl Sagan said: “It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected.”

So. Write fast. Write loose. Open your creative floodgates. Go!

Do you have any techniques that help shatter your writer’s block? Let us know in the comments.

PRACTICE

Play with one or more of the seven techniques. Take fifteen minutes, and write down the results. Post your results in the comments, and leave feedback on a few practices by other writers."



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