Writer’s block

by Valerica on February 17, 2010 · 6 comments

in Personal

Yeap, already :) Might be because I have to many small ideas and no big one(s), or maybe too much “noise”. 

For what is the first part, I have a self-imposed writing ethic: if it’s not significant and it doesn’t say anything, I can as well not bother writing about. And for the time beeing, apparently, none of the stuff going through my head is significant, important enough to be shared.

As for the second part, normally, I don’t need special conditions to write – I was reading a while ago on Stephen Fry’s blog, who I very much admire for the marvelous combination of Renaissance and post-modern type of personality that he is, that when he proceeds to writing he needs absolute silence and shutters completely from the world, refusing any form of interaction, even with sunlight.

I don’t compare to Stephen Fry, of course, but I feel rather comfortable doing a few things at the same time; hey, I used to write my french class essays in highschool  listening to a very vivid show on the local radio station ! And if you don’t know about French essays wrting method, let me just tell you that’s not a piece of cake. Plus I was pretty good at that too ! I promise I will get back to that in a future post (oh, there’s an idea…)

Anyway – I welcome distractions when in writing mood. It helps me jugle with ideas, fraze better, induce a cadence of words, relate to the reader. I sometimes listen to music or watch tv series during writing. Of course, the most important part is to be comfortable with the topic. ‘Cause I can have huge blocks when writing about more technical or really serious stuff, like for my day job, for instance.

But generally I welcome distractions; sometimes I even take on writing as a distraction fromanother activity. My favourite projection of myself is sitting in cafe (any Italian or Parisian cafe on the corner of a street will do) and writing stories on my laptom about people I see passing.

Still, I have found myself, over the last days, in the impossibility of writing down words with actual meaning. I know I have a little bit too much on my plate from my day job, which turns into a lot of noise, but it still is a problem.

I’ve been browsing through some articles on writing blocks, sets of advices and exercises to unblock the flow of thoughts, but I still haven’t found a good “recipe”.

Instead of that, I just opened up a new window for adding a post and decided to say a few words to kind of justify the unsually long pause. Only to find myself some 400 words later that I’ve written a whole post about this. Humm, I guess actually typing the words on the keyboards worked like some sort of a mantra and opened the flow.

Having told you about me, I’m curious what is it that works for you when you experience writer’s block – do you have some sort of a ritual likemyabe handwriting with colored pens, do you abandon yourself to the block hoping for a change of mood or do you in fact deploy a technique, or specific exercises to generate the flow of ideas and words ?

Later Edit: I came across a very interesting and informative post about writer’s block and 50 ways to overcome it on the “Simply Will Do” blog by @zcserei.

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