10 Tried and True Tips For Fighting Writer's Block
1.Try revising your draft as if someone who wasn’t a totally worthless, talentless hack was writing it.
2.Relax, remind yourself that no one who ever wrote anything worth a damn ever got blocked, and start researching trade schools in your area.
3.Find a work of literature that really inspires you and throw it in the garbage because you don’t deserve the pleasure of reading and all that inspiration was clearly some kind of illusion.
4.Go back to something you wrote previously, re-read it and take some time to contemplate how the rigors of aging have ruined your brain and deprived you of any promise you once had.
5.Catch the next flight to the Williamsburg-Newport News airport. When you land rent a car. Leaving the airport, take a right onto Denbigh Blvd, then another right onto Old Denbigh. Keep straight as Old Denbigh becomes Oriana Rd, continue on as Oriana Rd become Lakeside drive. Take a left on Victory Rd, then a right on Pond View. Park at the corner of Pond View and Wind Forest Ln, and walk to the end of the block. You’ll see a tan house, second from the end of the block. Go around back and look under the west corner of the deck, you’ll find a plastic goat mask and a parka. Remove your clothes and put these on, then come up onto the deck and wait for me, I’ll come to you, I’ll take care of everything.
6.Relieve some stress by screaming at your kids for laughing too loud (make sure you explain you’re just trying to break through a block, they’ll understand).
7.Try shaking up your routine by developing an addiction to a Schedule II narcotic.
8.Try urinating out into the yard through the mail slot in your front door (it’s not as easy as you’d think!)
9.Search the internet for advice on getting past a block. Search and search. See how many pages of results there are? So many. You know what all these pages, all these pages and pages have in common? You don’t? Better read them all, then.
10.Take a moment to reflect on the fact that being blocked while trying to write is a minor problem in the scope of the full human experience. Think of all the people starving, freezing, without shelter. Think of the refugees, think of all the people all over the world dying from easily treated diseases. All this, and you’re spending your day worried you can’t figure out what some imaginary character should say to some other imaginary character. Doesn’t that seem so meaningless, really? Isn’t that kind of a decadent problem? I mean, how unbelievably lucky you are, that writer’s block is your biggest problem. Did anyone ever throw acid in your face for the crime of trying to go to school? Isn’t that awful? And has anyone written a story about that kind of thing yet, or a poem? Maybe worth thinking about…maybe write something about that.