Writer’s Unblock

If you are like me, there are some moments when you have no inspiration. You sit to write or do something creative, and everything feels stale.

Everything you come up with is uninteresting, and you feel absolutely repulsed by the boring ideas that you even dare consider.

And then there are other moments when everything flows superbly, and you are no longer even the one writing, but it is just coming out through your fingertips whether you want it or not.

Those, interestingly, can happen not too long after a drought, if you are able to unblock yourself and get yourself moving forward. It doesn’t really matter what on.

For this reason, when I am particularly inspired, I often load up on 5 to 10 drafts for new ideas of things to write about (and projects). I just start new documents and write a couple of lines for each in order to set the foundation for something to be built in the future.

I am like a caveman who hasn’t eaten in forever and finally hunted a massive animal. I load up. I feast on creativity and inspiration to accumulate layers of fat for harsher times, because I know how rare it is to be truly inspired.

Ideally, I would always be in this divine state, but I know that that is not really possible.

So when I don’t have inspiration, I often open up one of these documents in which the foundations are already laid, and just work off of those. It makes things much easier.

“Write drunk, edit sober.”

When you are drunk on life and inspiration, plough ahead and write or create as fast as you can. It doesn’t matter if you are writing, designing, making music, or doing anything else creative. And do not censor yourself at all. Move forward at all costs and be proud of how rough draft the whole thing is.

And when you feel like it’s 5am, you are under-slept, and you have to catch a cross-country United economy flight, use those stored layers of fat and keep moving. I have made the mistake of stopping for months at a time.

Never stop.