Grow into the best writer you can be!
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if you're looking for writing advice, publishing tips, and overall writerly know how this is the place to be. All these posts are written by Mentors of Wattpairs.
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Writer's block is like the flu, a seasonal ailment that comes on its own terms and weakens your entire system. Unlike the flu, there's no vaccine for it. It strikes all writers at one point or two or twenty million in their career.
Have I escaped the bone-crunching grip of writer's block? Hell naw. There was a period in my life where I was going through so many new, important and life changing experiences that even while I forced myself to write, the content I was producing was steaming hot manure. At some point I had to recognize that if I kept going like that I was going to start hating the act of writing. I had to hit the NOPE button for a bit.
That for a bit turned into five solid years of not writing at all.
During those five years I lived a lot, learned, laughed, cried, made mistakes, grew up. I'd made a new home for myself, by myself, in a country located in a different continent from mine. I graduated. Found an awesome job. Met great people. I stopped living through my characters and instead did so through the lens of my own retinas.
Did I stop being a writer? Hell naw. All of these experiences gave me a new understanding of the world, myself and what I truly wanted to do with my life. One of those things, one of the biggest ones, is to be a writer.
If you're one and you're suffering from the ailment known as Writer's Block, this post is for you.
Disclaimer: There will be quite a lot of hard truth bombs in this post that I don't sugarcoat. This is not meant to be read as The Absolute Way To Get Rid of Writer's Block, but merely a compendium of what I've experienced. YMMV :)
1) Just Live Your Life
Listen, sometimes you just gotta let life run its course. If you're going through a transition period (you just lost someone you loved, moved to a new town, got a new job, started college, got a new puppy, etc.), you need to prioritize that. I promise that your writing journals aren't going to spit at you for not having used them in a bit.
What a lot of people don't understand is that sitting down and writing isn't the only thing there is to it. Some typical advice people give is write what you know, which is rooted in the sense that you should write about things that you have touched on with your experiences. Writing a NA set in college but you're a freshman and know nobody? Go and make friends. It'll improve your writing by leaps and bounds.
Don't shun life, that's where the source of inspiration is. And when you're sick of life? Come back to writing about it.
2) Find Your Tribe
Friends make the world go 'round. I'm not saying they're responsible for the rotation of the earth on its axis, but they certainly do help in the eagerness you may have to see another day of churning words. Having someone to be excited about writing with is just *kisses fingers* priceless.
Get yourself some writing friends. People who understand the weird and wonderful way your mind works and admire you for it, and people for whom you feel the same respect and love for.
