8 Ways to Get Past Writers Block

kiramartinauthor:

1. Read. Read a lot. Read everything you can, but don’t read like a reader, read like a writer. If you’re doing it right, there’s nothing that gets the juices flowing quite as well. This is the way you develop your style; you see things you like and things you don’t like in books and you put these values into your writing.
2. Read a good book. Reading a good book is why you got into writing in the first place, right? There’s something new you can learn from every book. You can see what works well and what you ARE doing. It’s inspiring to read good writing and it makes you want to try harder where you might be lacking.
3. Read a bad book. Not only will reading a bad published book make the world feel more hopeful, but it will make you see what you can avoid doing in your novel and what you KNOW you can do better than them.
4. Find other writers. Connecting with other writers is so important, whether online or in person. Not only is it nice to able to share your writing, but knowing you have a group or person to depend on with your same goals in mind is motivating. Even just talking through ideas with someone tends to yield more powerful results, and they have their own tips and trick they’ve learned that may help you.
5. Break it up. Chapters are there for both readers and writers. If you can get through one chapter, you can get through them all. Even make a different word document for each chapter if you need to. It will stop you more from going back and getting caught up in your plot holes that occurred fifty pages earlier.
6. Read the last page you wrote. The darkest of my writers block days have been stopped with this technique. Tell yourself you’ll just read the last page, maybe edit some phrasing. Then write the next page. Stopping off in the middle of a sentence helps as well. All this settles you into your story gently and gets you involved and editing a more polished draft at the end.
7. Keep notes. Texts messages can be sent to your email. Finding a pen and paper is hard sometimes, so you can just text ideas to your email. Not only is this handy to get fresh ideas down, but every time you check your email you’ll see these awesome ideas. Or keep a notebook if that works for you. Or write in the margins of your school work. Just get the ideas out.
8. Immerse yourself. The reason you started your story is because you have such a huge passion for it. What you need to do is remind yourself of these reasons as much as possible. Surround yourself with writing and creativity. Think about how your characters would respond to situations you find yourself in. Describe people you see in the streets as you would if you were introducing them to a novel. Look for people that look like your characters. Tell your friends about your book, give them your ideas. If your life isn’t a little bit about your story, you’re not doing it right.

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