Writing Exercises You Can Do To Avoid Writer’s Block

You sit there staring at your screen, willing the words to flow. They don’t. The ideas that were buzzing in your head at 4am, just seem locked away somewhere and no matter what, they never seem to fall out of your head at the right times do they. Well here’s my fail-safe answer to writers block.
Start writing – just anything.
You might start with – ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, but really why was the dog so lazy? If I were that fox I’d be barking and…’
Or start with – ‘Dear John, why do people talk about dear John letters instead of dear Sally letters? Is that because in the old days, fewer women could read? I wonder if… ‘
Just start writing what ever dumb stuff pops into your head. The trick to this is, make yourself keep writing words, for a minimum of 10 minutes. You are not allowed to stop. Even if you end up with ‘I can’t think what to write next, but I have to keep writing, so I’ll just keep making things up – I wonder what Mr Smith next door is really like when he’s not mowing his lawns in his pyjamas. Well I imagine…’ you get the general idea.
What happens when you do this, is that you start to get focused in your mind. The words at first might be rambling nonsense, but soon you really do ‘find your mojo’ as the words unlock from your mind and flow through your fingertips.
The trick is to make sure you don’t stop writing, even for a moment, for 10 whole minutes.
This is also a great way to get into the habit of writing if you are not used to doing so on a regular basis. I have a client I asked to start preparing to write articles on a regular basis, and she could write, but had very irregular starts at it. One or two (average) articles a year was not going to be enough to get her into the regular style she needed to become a recognized expert in her field. So for 10 minutes every day I asked her to just write anything – for one week. Then she was to expand that to 15 minutes a day, and make at least 10 minutes of that writing time a serious approach to blogging.
It worked so well that within 10 days she had sent me the first draft of a chapter in a new book she is contributing to. She’s now confidently working on a series of articles and loving the process of writing our her knowledge to share with others.