Intermission - tackling writer's block

The day job has intruded a bit this week (to the extent that it's been a bit of a night job too) so to keep you all sweet without having to think too hard myself I have an out-of-sequence piece for exactly this occasion.

So next week we'll return to story arcs and tension and release but in the meantime here are my dozen tips to tackle writer's block:

1) Take yourself somewhere different. Go for a walk, find a different cafe, jump on a tourist bus tour... Anything to mix up your environment. Make notes about who you see and how people behave.

2) Grab a copy of a good newspaper, something that does proper reporting not just celebrity gossip, and read through the stories. Look for themes or jarring inconsistencies. Who's writing the stories? Who's reading them? What are the personal stories behind the writers and readers?

3) Find a nice quiet room you know well, and really study it. The floorboards, the ceiling rose, the decoration. Who might have lived here before? What secrets could be buried here? What greatness might still come from this small space?

4) Pick up a different instrument, even if it's one you can barely play. Where does this take you in terms of harmony and rhythm? How does it feel to struggle and wrestle with something?

5) Ignore the instruments altogether. Write a pure set of lyrics to a melody unconstrained by chords or instrumentation. Or dispose of melody as well and write a poem to a beat.

6) Pretend to be your best friend. What moves them? What would they write about?

7) Pretend to be your worst enemy. How would it feel to be really evil? Can you write a song without an essence of redeeming features?

8) Set a metronome really fast, where does that send you? Then set it really slow.

9) Mix up your listening, tune to a new radio station or fish out some old records. Or, if you haven't binned them already, any CDs that you bought, played once, were really disappointed with and never listened to again. Try and listen for whatever aspect got them signed in the first place.

10) Write a letter that you always wanted to write but never had the guts or the opportunity to.

11) Swap your focus. Do you normally write about people and emotions? Write about animals and infrastructure. Do you normally write about death, monkeys and space-hardware? Write a love song.

Finally
12) Space and permission. I'm coming back to this again because if a) you try some of these but suffer distractions before you make any headway, or b) you do use one of the more locational suggestions above but then end up not finishing what you break through with...
Well, then we're back to square one.
So find that space and give yourself that permission.

Hopefully some, many or most of those will be of use at some point in the future. Pop your own suggestions in the comments below.

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