Wrestling with Writer's Block

Clearly, I've fallen out of the writing habit of late. Well, that's not entirely accurate. My workload at the office lately has involved a large number of writing assignments, so the majority of my resources have been diverted to those efforts. So now that I finally have time to sit down again and write for this blog … I'm drawing a blank.

So just for fun, I decided to see what the almighty Google had to offer.

This site suggests the hard-nosed, man-up approach to breaking writer's block: 1) Force yourself, 2) Write no matter what, 3) Embrace bad ideas (in the hopes it will trigger good, or at least better ideas, 4) Write about uncomfortable things, and 5) Publish something every day. On the whole, the hard-nosed approach is what I often take when I get stuck like this, but I'd prefer to latch on to a personal project of sorts that I'm passionate about. (Yes, I know that sentence ended poorly).

This site offers 15 tips to overcome the lack of ideas, which the author purports is always at the core of writer's block. His tips are basically suggestions for resources, such as: 1) looking at files on the computer, 2) browser bookmarks, 3) newspapers and magazines, 4) books and television, 5) old emails, 6) YouTube, 7) podcasts, and 8) good old-fashioned brainstorming. All of these are things I've tried, with some occasional success. But of course, the underlying challenge here is still finding something that not only interests me, but stands a reasonable chance of being of interest to others.

However, it was something that the author of this article said that I found rather illuminating:

For me, writer’s block often occurs when I’m uninspired or worn out from writing too much. Writing is an art like any other. You need inspiration to proceed, but too much work will wear you down and that inspiration will drain.

That is often precisely my problem. I produce a large amount of documentation for work on a regular basis, and sometimes it is indeed cognitively exhausting. Sitting down to work on personal writing projects, there just isn't anything left in the tank. And without a spark of inspiration to start the engine again, I just close the laptop and go off to do something else.

But I also know that if I allow myself to fall out of the habit of writing for personal fulfillment, it will be that much harder to get it going again. The hard-nosed way is really the only way for me, until a new project or essay idea comes along. The product of the hard-nosed way are posts like this.

See what I did there?

Until next time.