The #Creativity Hack No One Told You About: Read the #Obituaries

Got #writersblock?
#reading obits you to distant ideas, fueling associations that lead to unexpected breakthroughs

https://bit.ly/3EQqd1n

#amwriting #writingtips

Feeling Stuck With Your Manuscript? Going “Off Page” Could Be the Solution. https://www.writersdigest.com/feeling-stuck-with-your-manuscript-going-off-page-could-be-the-solution #WritingHabitsandPractices #overcomingwriter'sblock #TheWriter'sLife #RevisionTips #writersblock #firstdrafts #BeInspired

How To Rally Imaginary Friends To Help You Defeat Creative Blocks

Use creative rehearsals to stop procrastinating and start writing your fiction story Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/how-to-rally-imaginary-friends-to-help-you-defeat-creative-blocks-73d6d472c05

#writersblocksolutions #writersblock #ideas #inspiration #procrastination
@indieauthors

Thinking

I sit and draw a doodle doodle doo
Whilst I pet my poodle poodle poo;
I am the thinker – with a mental blank.

#writers #writing #poetry #poem #writersblock

Me a second or two after tooting a curmudgeonly thread I spent the last hour working on in place of the piece of writing I began last week.

#WritersBlock

Neulich auf einer Insel:!
Wenn es jetzt auch noch ein Kaltgetränk namens "Zeitkritische Relevanz" gäbe, könnte ich mir den Wiedereinstieg ins Erzähl-Geschäft fast vorstellen 😆
Fast.

#Heldenreise #erzählen #writersblock #autor

Move First, Write Later: My Top 5 Ways to Wake Up Creativity

In my last post, I talked about how I don’t wait for inspiration anymore. I go looking for it—or better yet, I move until it finds me.

Here’s the thing about my brain: it loves motion. Something about my body being active while my mind wanders is the sweet spot. When I’m physically moving, I slip into a mental space where my characters come alive, my scenes find clarity, and I start dreaming up new ways to get my protagonists into (and hopefully out of) trouble.

So when the creative well runs dry, or I’ve gone a while without being immersed in my current WIP, I go back to the last thing I wrote and then get moving. That combo is like flipping the switch back on.

Here are my Top 5 Activities That Always Bring Me Back to My Story:

1. Shower Time = Plot Time

There’s just something about being in hot water—literally. When I’m in the shower, calientita and relaxed, my mind drifts straight into my stories. The warmth, the white noise, the solitude? It’s my personal idea incubator.

I’ve plotted full chapters in the time it takes me to condition my hair. Shower thoughts are real—and for writers, they’re golden.

2. Walking with a Soundtrack

Give me a clear track and I’m good to go. I plug in music (instrumentals only—no lyrics to fight with my thoughts) and start walking. The key is matching the music to the mood of the scene or character. If I’m writing action, I’ll queue up something cinematic and fast-paced. If it’s a sad or introspective moment, cue the violins. Love scene? Break out the soft piano or even the moody love songs.

I’m not just walking—I’m building worlds in my head, one step at a time.

3. Running to Jumpstart the Brain

Now let’s be clear: I’m not out here sprinting like I’m training for the Olympics. I run at a chill pace, but it’s enough to shake things loose. Running helps me get unstuck faster than walking, especially when I’m wrestling with a scene or trying to figure out a character’s next move.

Nature, movement, and that steady rhythm of breath and heartbeat—it’s like my inner storyteller gets jogged back to life.

4. People Watching for Character Fuel

I spend a lot of time in airports, so I do this without even trying. But whether it’s a coffee shop, bookstore, park, or library—watching people is one of the best ways to get inspired. Every person has a story, and when I imagine what those stories could be, I start unraveling new threads of fiction.

Sometimes it’s just the way someone adjusts their bag strap or looks at their phone. Those little details open the door to big narrative questions.

5. Driving (or Being Driven) to Think Freely

When I’m on a known route, driving becomes meditative. I play the kind of music I mentioned earlier and let my thoughts drift into story territory. If the drive requires too much focus, though, I’ll ask someone to take the wheel while I zone out in the passenger seat.

Even better? Public transportation. No need to focus on the road. Just sit back, put on your headphones, and go wherever your mind takes you. That mental space? It’s priceless.

Final Thoughts:

Creativity isn’t passive—it’s something you chase, court, or wrestle with. For me, that chase almost always starts with motion. When my body gets going, my brain follows. That’s the rhythm I’ve learned to trust, especially when inspiration is hiding.

And honestly? There’s no shame in needing a little push. Not every writing session begins with magic—but if you move first, the magic usually shows up.

Writers, what’s your version of creative motion? What do you do when you’re feeling stuck or disconnected from your current work-in-progress?

#creativeProcess #LatinaAuthor #writerSBlock #writingHabits #WritingTips

People talk about this a lot, but I hope this will be helpful! #writers #writersblock #creativetoot @bookstodon

https://www.purposefulprose.org/post/writer-s-block-what-it-is-and-what-it-can-be-instead

Generative AI and the Anxieties of Academic Writing

I’ve been a blogger for as long as I’ve been an academic writer, even if I’ve been a writer for longer than I’ve been a blogger. After two decades of regular blogging, on a succession of strange and deeply personal spaces before launching my current blog in 2010, it was difficult for me to untangle the relationship between blogging and writing. I’d written on many occasions about the role of blogging in my enjoyment of writing, suggesting that it provided a forum in which ideas could be worked out in a public relationship to a slightly nebulous audience (Carrigan 2019). If I return to the end of my part-time PhD I can see that I understood this relationship in terms of a freedom from constraint, reflecting in Carrigan (2014) that “Blogging was a release from the all the structure pressures corroding the creative impulse” which “helped me make my peace with the jumping through hoops that a modern academic career unavoidably entails”. The fact that “I can write whatever the hell I want here” helped me “feel better about subjugating what I want to write to instrumental considerations elsewhere”.

In other words, it helped me find a particular way of trying together my internal and external motivations. It provided a forum for craft writing, passionate writing motivated purely by my own interests, as opposed to the extrinsically motivated writing which I imagined defined the priorities of the working academic. It left me with a stark opposition between what I wanted to do and what I had to do, treating the former as a palliative which made the latter more bearable. Ten years later at a mid-career stage, this compromise no longer seems tenable to me and I find it strange that it ever did. It suggests to me a difficulty in reconciling oppositions, as if something could be done entirely for my own reasons or entirely to please others but the two clusters of motivations could never meet.

This tension between writing for ourselves and writing for others sits at the heart of many academic anxieties. It’s also precisely the space where generative AI now intervenes, promising to smooth over the difficulties and frictions that define our relationship with writing. Are you present when you are writing? Or are you somewhere else? Are you feeling an energy to the words as you are writing them? Or are you watching the clock, literally or figuratively, waiting to meet your target or for the time you’ve carved out to elapse? These questions about presence and engagement become even more pressing when AI tools offer to take over the aspects of writing we find most challenging. The parts where we struggle, where we feel most distant from our words, are exactly where the temptation to outsource becomes strongest.

I’ve drawn attention throughout this book to the audience we are addressing (or failing to) through our writing. For many academic writers, this sense of audience can be overwhelming as a vector of expectation. How will I please them? What if they don’t like what I’ve written? What if I’m not taken seriously? These expectations are filtered through real encounters from the notorious reviewer two, through to encouraging supervisor or the dismissive colleague at a seminar. These encounters might be mediated or predicated upon inaction, such as the paper which goes determinedly uncited by others, even as the view count slowly ratchets up on the journal’s page. However they are often defined by an anticipatory anxiety in which these experiences mutate into a diffuse sense of what our professional community expects from us and what we feel we are able (or unable) to deliver to them through our writing. Even the functional writing which fills our days has an audience implicit within it. It’s not just that our emails, reports and forms will have readers, rather we are trying to influence or bring about an effect in them through what and how we write (Jones 2022: 9).

Often these intentions are so familiar and mundane that they operate beneath the surface, only becoming apparent to us when when we realise our email has been misconstrued or our form rejected for what is perceived as some mistake. But this doesn’t diminish the role of the audience, as much as it shows how these dynamics can be folded into the functional routines of the bureaucracies within which we work. If you see machine writing as a means to an end, you’re unlikely to enter into this dynamic. Instead you will approach this software as a way of producing something as quickly as possible, whether that’s a section of a document to ‘fill in the blanks’ or a complete text. As the philosopher Gillian Rose (1995) once described writing: “that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control”. If we use conversational agents purely to expand our control, to enact our aspiration in ever more effective ways, we imperil our access to those ‘regions beyond our control’ from which inspiration emerges.

#anxiety #audience #generativeAI #scholarship #writersBlock

Seven Writing Fears That May Be Holding You Back from Greatness

By Eleanor Hecks Writing is a journey filled with challenges, many of which stem from internal fears that can stifle creativity and hinder progress. Recognizing and addressing these fears is crucial for writers and educators aiming to foster a…
https://writershelpingwriters.net/2025/04/seven-writing-fears-that-may-be-holding-you-back-from-greatness/

#GuestPost #WritersAttitude #WritersBlock #WritingTime
@indieauthors

How To Invite the Muse To Play With Blocks

Use creative rehearsals to stop procrastinating and start writing your nonfiction article Continue reading on The Writing Cooperative »
https://writingcooperative.com/how-to-invite-the-muse-to-play-with-blocks-ab4a569f16b

#creativeblock #procrastination #ideas #writersblock #inspiration
@indieauthors

Sometimes there's just too much news https://pgdailynews.ca/index.php/2025/04/07/sometimes-theres-just-too-much-news/ #cityofpg #princegeorgebc #northernbc #writersblock #cdnpoli

How to Use Writing Prompts to “Unstick” #WritersBlock via @angelaackerman
https://writershelpingwriters.net/2025/04/use-writing-prompts-to-unstick-writers-block/

This week's penguin: One way to cure writer's block.
http://pengcognito.com/index.php?id=writeunblock
#penguins #pengcognito #cartoon #WritersBlock #SocialMedia

@vigocarpathian This is not only wonderful practical advice, but inspiring - thank you!
#procrastinator #WritersBlock #writing #MeaningOfLife

One of my articles from 2022.

https://irming.com/posts/code_and_music_timelines_and_lifelines/

#coding #music #retro #creativity #happiness #productivity #CodersBlock #WritersBlock

How to Use Writing Prompts to “Unstick” Writer’s Block

By Savannah Cordova Stop me if you’ve heard this one: you’re at your desk, laptop or notebook open, hours stretching out before you… but you can’t seem to get the words down. You feel stuck, hopeless, and incapable of moving forward; in other words, you’ve got writer’s…
https://writershelpingwriters.net/2025/04/use-writing-prompts-to-unstick-writers-block/

#GuestPost #WritersAttitude #WritersBlock #WritingCraft
@indieauthors

Shoutout to my fellow #writers who break their #writersblock while sitting on the toilet.

I wrote several sentences today.

Any progress is progress.

#WritersBlock #WritersLife #WritingCommunity

heaped wads of paper
poetry shunning foul truth
bring a better world

#WritersBlock #haiku #senryu #poem #ShortPoem #SmallPoem #SmallPoems #writing #WritingCommunity #Writers