How to deal with writer’s block

If you’re staring at your keyboard and would rather wipe it than type on it, this could be a sign of writer’s block. Will it last forever? No. Is there anything you can do about it? Sure.

It’s like being boxed between cars in a parallel parking space. Tight, but you have choices: You can wait until the owner of the other car comes along to free you. Or you can inch your vehicle by increments until you wiggle out.

Trying to think of something new to do might sound like an experiment in frustration when your thoughts already seem blah or singularly uninspired, but don't fret. Remember: Wiggle.

Do something different. If you can’t go anywhere, stand on a chair or stretch out on the floor, but get a fresh perspective. Look up and notice the texture of the ceiling. Look down. Describe your feet. Look around and notice the sound, smell, sight, taste, or feel of objects surrounding you every day. Munch your salad slowly and identify the flavors and textures. Compare. Listen to the hum of a washing machine, a fan, a furnace, an air conditioner, then fill in words that fit the beat.

Take a mini-vacation. Getting away from normal surroundings can help you to chip big chunks from a writer’s block even if just for an afternoon of vacating your premises. (Pun intended.) Use your writer’s block as the impetus for touring that museum in town you keep meaning to visit. Or go to a movie with sub-titles. Check out a library book of poems totally unlike anything you usually read or write. Pick up a travel magazine, and look at photographs of enticing places. Search for a video of a country you hope to visit or, better yet, one you would never dare to set a sandal inside.

Consider your interests and available options. Writer’s block is like a box every poet or writer steps into occasionally, but you don’t have to stay there. Even if you’re really boxed in, you have choices. Jump out. Find a different perspective on whatever is familiar, safe, or boring!

Mingle! Get around people. Go to a mall. Help out at a Christian service center. Attend a Bible study. Worship with a church you have never visited.

Take care of yourself. If none of the above appeals to you, lounge on the deck. Rock out on the porch. Pray for the Lord to speak to you even as you sleep. Take a nap.


[The original version of this article appeared here on March 5, 2010, entitled “Writer’s Block In A Box.”]

©2015, Mary Harwell Sayler, poet-author, is on a mission to help other Christian Poets & Writers through blogs, writing resources, and e-books such as the Christian Writer’s Guide and Christian Poet's Guide to Writing Poetry.

…

Enjoying The Things of Earth

The Bible often mentions (and pastors often stress) the need to be in this world without being worldly. Obviously that danger exists, since we’re such sensory people, but most Christians have long learned to be wary of that pitfall – perhaps too much so!

The thing is: God created our senses. We hear, touch, smell, taste, and see a sensory-rich world around us, so God surely did not create such lavishness for us to ignore. Although temptations can come through our senses, our Creator does not tempt us! God is love. And, more than any earthly parent, our Heavenly Father wants to give us good gifts to receive with thanks and enjoyment.

As poets and writers, we draw on these senses each time we write or speak words into being. Nevertheless, I haven’t thought much about the need to enjoy – really enjoy – the things of the earth, except to note that one of my all-time favorite poems is “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” by the Pulitzer prized poet Richard Wilbur. So when Crossway released the book The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts by Joe Rigney, I eagerly requested a review copy, which the publisher kindly sent.

If you have ever felt guilty for enjoying life and its gifts, read this book! If you think holiness cannot abide laughter, read this book. If you merely tolerate each day, read this book.

As Joe Rigney wisely says, “we can see that God is meticulous in his attention to detail” so that even “every ant has a genealogy. There are no rogue molecules. There are no random atoms. There are no wayward snowflakes. Everything has purpose. Everything has design. Everything has intent. We may not always know exactly what it is, but we can rest in the knowledge that God is working all things according to the counsel of his will, that his purposes are always for our good.”

Along those lines, this highly readable text develops a theology called “Christian hedonism,” which greatly differs from the no-no kind, especially if we see all of creation as “communication from the triune God.”

God the Father has given us a mind, body, and spirit akin to God’s own, so we rightly pull ourselves together as one person in three. As Professor Rigney says, “We don’t set God and his gifts in opposition to each other, as though they are rivals,” nor must we disintegrate in opposition to ourselves. “When we love God supremely and fully, we are able to integrate our joy in God and our joy in his gifts, receiving the gifts as shafts of his glory.”

And “So embrace your creatureliness. Don’t seek to be God. Instead, embrace the glorious limitations and boundaries that God has placed on you as a character in his story.” Then write your story or poem or article, and read this book!


©2015, Mary Harwell Sayler

The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts, paperback


…

Artistic, creative people get creative at any age

In high school days of English lit, teachers of teens loved to extol boy-or-girl-wonders such as the poet William Cullen Bryant, who reportedly wrote Thanatopsis at the young age of 18. Thanks to the Internet, a little research not only showed this information to be verifiable and true, but the kid actually published poems years earlier!

Now decades past my expiration date for being a wonder, I wondered what happened to Bryant. Not much went on with his poems, but the boy-poet advanced into his 80’s as an editor and writer of prose.

I’ll take that as an encouragement and hope you will too, because, at any age, creative people can and do find outlets for creativity.

What interests me even more than age or art genres, though, is how one artistic endeavor often leads to another. Take Thomas Hardy, for example. He started out as an architect and somehow that visual art helped him to write artistically in all literary genres.

Or consider the Reverend Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, besides studying theology, studied art and music – all of which he then combined into poems still loved and bought by the book-load today.

In investigating how one art informs another, I also discovered that W.B. Yeats studied art too, whereas G.K. Chesterton reviewed books about art. In and on other artistic stages, James Joyce sang professionally, and Dylan Thomas tried writing movie scripts.

How successful those creative acts were, I do not know, but each of those poets and writers wrote memorable manuscripts for years, some even into old age – timeless, tireless poems and stories still studied, collected, and recollected with ageless honor. What a wonder!


~~

(c) 2010, Mary Sayler



~~