Smash That Block!

          I love to write. If I don’t get to write for awhile, if get irritable and cranky. It’s as necessary for me to write as it is for me to eat or sleep. Even when I’m not actually writing, my mind is capturing and playing with ideas. The stray word or phrase, the interesting character, an intriguing circumstance.

          Sometimes, though, the ideas dry up and disappear. (Don’t you hate when that happens?) No matter how hard I search and struggle, I can’t pull anything worth writing out of my brain. Sometimes that signifies that I really need a break and I should back off the pressure and go do something fun. When I return to the computer in a day or so, the words flow easily from brain to keyboard. Sometimes, though, what I really need is to push through the block and just start writing. (Learning to discern which it is at any given time is a trick I’m still trying to master.)

          When I realize I just need to force myself to write, I do that in several different ways. I might spend 10-20 minutes just writing random thoughts about what I could be writing or how I feel about not having any ideas. A lot of times, this is all that is needed and I end up segueing into my project. At other times, I need a little help. That’s usually when I turn to my prompt books. I have a few I return to over and over again.

          “Fast Fiction” by Roberta Allen is probably my most-used. I think this is where I first read the idea of setting the timer for 5-minutes and writing as fast as possible about something. Suggestions from this book include “Write a story about a lie,” “Write a story about death,” or “Write a story about a disguise.” Other books I’ve used for inspiration are “Everyday Creative Writing – Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink) by Michael C. Smith and Suzanne Greenberg and “Story Starters” by Lou Willett Stanek.

          Lately I’ve been searching for other places to generate ideas. Of course, just as any sane person in this time would do, I Googled “creative writing prompts”.) I came up with more sites than I could possibly go visit in a reasonable amount of time. Here are a few I have visited.

• http://www.creativewritingprompts.com/
  This one has a page full of numbers. When you hover your cursor over the numbers, a pop up window appears with the short prompt.
• http://writingfix.com/index.htm
  This one has several lists of writing prompts, sorted by type, such as right-brain prompts and left-brain prompts.
• http://www.creativity-portal.com/howto/writing/writing.prompts.html
  This one has picture prompts.
• http://www.thewritingsite.org/resources/prompts/default.asp
  This one has lots of prompts as well as ideas for teaching others to write.

          How do you break through writer’s block?