*Blink*Blink*Blink. We have all seen it before: The dreaded blinking cursor of a Word document. It stares at us, mocking us, laughing, and waiting for you to start typing. You sit there trying to type and trying to write something meaningful for your readers but you can’t come up with anything. Your brain suddenly goes blank and you lose to the blinking cursor. Blinking Cursor- 1 You- 0. It happens from time to time. No one is immune to it. It even happens to the best writers, screenwriters, journalist, you name it.
So why does it happen?
Sometimes, you have a deadline to finish something. You feel the pressure and your creativity drowns and you produce sub-par work. Guess what? It’s noticeable. It’s like knowing someone is smiling or frowning over the phone by listening to the tone of their voice. Your audience knows whether you put your all into your writing or if you procrastinated and desperately wrote crap.
Writers block also happens because our brains are exhausted and want to go on vacation. Sometimes our brains want to take vacations for days, sometimes weeks, and on rare occasions even months and years. When your brain wants to go on vacation, it’s probably best to let it. Eventually it comes back, wanting to start working again, ready to tackle anything you throw at it. It comes back in full force and for a period of time you can’t stop writing. You write till your brain can’t take it anymore you write till your hands feel like you have arthritis. You can’t force it. You can’t tell your brain to come back to you when you feel like it. It decides on its own when to come back and start producing.
How to overcome writers block
Treat your brain like you would an hard working employee. Give it time to rest, reward it with enjoyable hobbies and try not to force creativity from it when it doesn’t want to. This blog has been void of posts for over a month because, for that time, I have been giving my brain a vacation. I seemingly lost my passion to write and share so I started to do other things beside writing. I read books I have been putting off, saw movies that I wanted to see, played video games I wanted to play, met people I wanted to see and went to places I wanted to go. I abandoned my blog for a month because It’s because my brain wanted it. It screamed to stop and smell the roses. From this vacation, I found inspiration. Before the vacation, I desperately wanted to keep my blog updated but I couldn’t find any inspiration to write and when I tried finding some, it eluded me. Only when I took a break, I found inspiration and started to write again.
Writers block is viewed as something negative. The word “block” has that vibe to it. When you block something, you are preventing it from accomplishing its purpose. Why not take this negative word and turn it into something positive? I embrace writers block because I know my brain is ready for a vacation. From this vacation, I know I will find inspiration. Sometimes, from places I am least expecting. So don’t let writers block keep you down. Embrace its reason and give your brain a rest.
