When Life Gives You Writer’s Block, Build With It!

There’s nothing worse than being bogged down with writer’s block — it interrupts the flow of writing, derails your creativity and leaves you frustrated. But as with all things in life, the best thing to do when faced with a challenge, is to make the best of it and work you way through it.

For writers, this means taking your episodes of writer’s block and building something with them.

Before you can start building though, you’ll need to discover the different shapes of your various blocks — the way you do that is by approaching your writer’s block with an analytical eye.

Exploring Your Writer’s Block

Just as building blocks are made of a wide variety or shapes and sizes, episodes of writer’s block can vary from one another drastically. The goal is to analyze why you’re bogged down with writer’s block.

My most recent case of writer’s block — perhaps the worst yet — involved a few common emotional states known to trigger writer’s block. It started with anxiety, then evolved into frustration, which further evolved into a light case of depression.

Once you’ve explored your writer’s block from an analytical point of view and pinpointed the reasons why it came about, you can start inching your way back into the creative process with a few basic exercises.

Start Building:

Only after you’ve discovered what caused your writer’s blocks will you be able to build with them.

Character

The easiest place to start when setting out to build something with your writer’s block is character. If there’s anything most writer’s share in common, it’s the way they draw details and facts from their own lives in order to create those that populate their stories.

If you’re feeling anxious, perhaps you might invent a character struck with severe anxiety … what might happen if that character were to lose the medication they take to balance their anxiety during a flight?

Themes

If you’re feeling a strong emotion during your block, consider exploring it through thematic value. One way to do this might be to explore the positive and negative versions of such an emotion — take serenity and frustration, for example.

Conflict

Take your writer’s block and project it toward someone of the opposite status — for example, create a character suffering from depressed and partner he or she up with someone cheerful and see what happens.

Your Own Bridge

Overall, the idea behind this exercise is to overcome your writer’s block and get back to creating your story — building a bridge you might say.

As I often say about writing, there’s no right or wrong way to go about it — it simply needs to work for your own creative process; for me, I start with an analytic approach because my episodes of writer’s block usually limits my ability to create. Once I’ve discovered what’s fueling my block, I can use that to image a character, theme, or conflict — you might take it a bit further and even build an entire story based on what’s triggered your own case of writer’s block.

Do you have your own unique way of dealing with writer’s block, or do you simply ride out the storm?