Gregory Grayson
Thankfully I don't suffer much from writer's block. I attribute this to two things:
1. Discipline. Being a husband and father I don't have a lot of time at home (really, none) to get my writing done. Therefore, I've had to find the time elsewhere to be productive. I take public transportation to work. In the beginning this was my time to write, just 20 short minutes per session. Hard to get a lot of words down in that time, but it forced me to get right to the point each day I started writing. Once I expanded my writing time to the second half of my lunch hour, I soon found I was able to bang out decent content without much "warm up".
2. Habits. I used to be a smoker, and I was really good at it. What I mean by this is I hit upwards of two packs at day at my peak. Then I inadvertently went a whole day once without having a cigarette. It wasn't a conscious decision, I had just gotten really busy and distracted from the desire to light one up. This got me thinking about how far I could take it. So the next day I resisted, and if the urge to smoke came on I tried distracting myself until the feeling passed. This continued until, one day, I had officially quit smoking cold-turkey. These days the smell of smoke actually bothers me.
What does this have to do with writing? Well, instead of writer's block per se, I would often get a feeling of anxiety right before my fingers hit the keyboard, that sense of procrastination which started feeding my brain all the little excuses to not write:
"I'm too busy."
"I don't know what I'm going to write."
"I don't feel like it."
Instead of giving in to these little demons, I found the best thing was just to push past them and start typing. Even if it was just for five seconds, it was enough to distract myself from the anxiety and get into the flow of writing. I did this often enough that my habit of making excuses finally went away entirely, and now I don't have to fight to put words on the page.
1. Discipline. Being a husband and father I don't have a lot of time at home (really, none) to get my writing done. Therefore, I've had to find the time elsewhere to be productive. I take public transportation to work. In the beginning this was my time to write, just 20 short minutes per session. Hard to get a lot of words down in that time, but it forced me to get right to the point each day I started writing. Once I expanded my writing time to the second half of my lunch hour, I soon found I was able to bang out decent content without much "warm up".
2. Habits. I used to be a smoker, and I was really good at it. What I mean by this is I hit upwards of two packs at day at my peak. Then I inadvertently went a whole day once without having a cigarette. It wasn't a conscious decision, I had just gotten really busy and distracted from the desire to light one up. This got me thinking about how far I could take it. So the next day I resisted, and if the urge to smoke came on I tried distracting myself until the feeling passed. This continued until, one day, I had officially quit smoking cold-turkey. These days the smell of smoke actually bothers me.
What does this have to do with writing? Well, instead of writer's block per se, I would often get a feeling of anxiety right before my fingers hit the keyboard, that sense of procrastination which started feeding my brain all the little excuses to not write:
"I'm too busy."
"I don't know what I'm going to write."
"I don't feel like it."
Instead of giving in to these little demons, I found the best thing was just to push past them and start typing. Even if it was just for five seconds, it was enough to distract myself from the anxiety and get into the flow of writing. I did this often enough that my habit of making excuses finally went away entirely, and now I don't have to fight to put words on the page.
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