It happens to all of us. You’re sitting there in front of your laptop, just staring at the empty page in the word processor, thinking “How in the heck do I start this piece?”
Whether you’re doing something like creative writing or something more technical, like report writing services, we all get stumped from time to time. Here are five tips to get your creativity flowing:
Take a Walk
It’s hard to find an accomplished author who doesn’t recommend a nice long walk as one of the best ways to get the mind going. This isn’t just another writer’s superstition, by the way, there’s actually scientific evidence to back it up.
Watch a Rerun
Watching the newest episode of The Walking Dead is, well, a little too engaging, and watching a favorite movie takes a good hour and a half to two hours out of your day. What you want is a good half hour block where you can sort of put your brain on cruise control and relax. Rewatch a favorite episode of Cheers or The Simpsons, something familiar and fun to give your mind some downtime and let ideas seep in.
Just Write
One of the best ways to kickstart your brain is to just start putting those fingers to the keys. What you write might come off as gibberish, but that’s what backspace is for. Sometimes hammering out that first paragraph, then deleting it, takes less time and effort than waiting for a good opening sentence to come along.
Skim an Older Piece
Sometimes the reason we just can’t get started is because we’re intimidated by the blank page. Here’s a tip to get over that fear: take a piece you’ve written in the past from out of your archives and skim it. If it’s a really early piece, you might feel a little embarrassed by some amateur mistakes, but taking a piece from the last week or two can help to take the pressure off; you can do this, you have done this, and it’s no big deal.
Develop a Ritual
Whether it’s taking a sip of coffee every time you start a new paragraph, puffing on a pipe like Mark Twain, or setting up a work playlist before you jump into an article, writing rituals can help you to get your brain into the right space in order to get some serious writing done. Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea standing up at his typewriter in order to lend his work a sense of urgency.
Remember that, at the end of the day, they’re just words. They’ll come, if you let them.
Gilbert S lives in New Mexico with his wife and two cats. When not writing, he’s usually drawing or binging on old episodes of Frasier.
