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Writers BlockHere are some sure fire exercises to help you get past that pesky little parasite called Writers Block. 1. Think outside the box...maybe even way outside.If you've had a wrench thrown at your wonderful story than throw one back. Throw a new obstacle at the protagonists and see what they do. Don't worry if it reads like junk, you can always cut it out later. In the meantime, you avoided the rut. Some of the Writers at Christian Romance Magazine, avoid the rut by creating, what we call, A Journal of Journeys. 2. Making a Journal of Journeys.Create a notebook of characters that you have met inside your imagination while you were thinking about different stories you would like to write. You can come up with characters simply by taking pictures out of magazines and writing short bios on who you think these people are. Paste them in a binder with their bios and throw one of them into your story when writers block hits. Likewise situations. Think of situations you would like to have happen in your different stories in the future. Or you can write down some you heard on the news. Title the incident or accident and possible outcomes or cures. Then when writers block hits you, browse through your notebook for some creative juice. 3. Borrow the Juice and Take an Immersion Vacation.If you are currently working on a project and have your characters established, perhaps the best thing for you to do is go read a good book. Yeah! immerse yourself in someone else's creative juices for awhile. You'll come back to your project fresher than before, with perhaps a new inside voice that allows you to explore another way of "saying it." Our writers like to pick up a book that's sure to be full of drama for their Immersion Vacation. One's that have characters with accents help to create the illusion of being somewhere else. And somewhere else is where you want to be to get out of that writing rut. 4. Find the Drain on Your Story.If, however, your characters are not so well established or developed, you must find the culprit character that is dragging the story down. Usually the culprit or the drain-on-your-story, is one of the characters that doesn't seem to do anything of importance. They just seem to fill up needed pages without lending any "Must Read" time to your story. For instance, maybe their dear Aunt Mable is not a necessary character in your small-town-farm story. Or maybe Aunt Mable is not what she seems. What if suddenly this benign character did something that was so out of character, that it sent shock waves through the entire novel. The kind of Shock waves that caused you to have to clean up her mess. That could take a lot of pages to help the heroine figure out what to do with that info. In other words...either get rid of the unnecessary character or make them valuable to the story. Even if all Aunt Mable did in the story was become the anchor for the protagonist (hero or heroine). 5. Turn the Drain Into the Train.As we stated in the previous paragraph, the drain must be erased or else turned into a driving force in the story. The Train if you will. Sometimes a seemingly useless character is only a hero in disguise. If you've ever read Superman, you know how that works out to Clark Kent's advantage. Of course you don't have to make it so obvious to the audience. Give them a bite or nibble here and there to keep them guessing, "Who is this person and what are they up to?" To help you do this, think of the last time something hit you out of nowhere. What did you do, how did you respond. Knowing your character the way you do, what would he/she do with it, if the same thing happened to them? Writing a historical? What if our dear Aunt Mable had actually been married when she was 14? Maybe she thought she had been divorced from the mean Colin Foster, but the papers never made it in the county records. Aunt Mabel had been providing a pretty good living on her established farm when along comes Colin to claim his right to her money. Aunt Mable has always been a sweet giving woman, but now that she's faced with this blackguard, that once-buried feisty, tenacity comes to the surface again and we see Aunt Mable become Mistress Marabel...have gun will travel. Now that all seems a bit far fetched but you get my meaning. So when you feel like you can't write another word, try taking a vacation from your own writing and immerse yourself in another book. See the Christian book reviews page for novels we would recommend. You are sure to find plenty of creative juice you can borrow from authors who have been there themselves! Happy Writing!
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