Tag: inspiration

Posted in Exercises

Exercise: Impressions and Perceptions

Posted on by AJ

When meeting someone for the first time, your first impression may or may not be right. The same goes for characters. Like real people, characters don’t always perceive each other correctly. Sometimes we can think of someone as ‘bossy’ when they’re just trying to be helpful. That expands far beyond first impressions.

As an exercise: List each character and how they view the others in your story. Consider what causes this impression and how it’s different from others’ views on the same character.  

Posted in writing

Coping With Writer’s Block

Posted on by AJ

It happens to almost every creative out there. Block. Writer’s Block is arguably the most famous and well known. It’s often presented as a lack of ideas but writer’s block can also take another form: lack of energy. You might have plenty of ideas, but no motivation to get them down.

Regardless of how it presents itself, the result is largely the same: your writing has ground to a practical stop. There are a variety of reasons behind a block. You might be stressed, exhausted, dealing with real life issues or perhaps you’re coming down with a heavy case of seasonal allergies. Perhaps you don’t know why. The why may not matter, but coping with it does.

Recharge. A lot of blockage might come from needing to recharge. This goes both for your healthy, and your well of ideas. Put the writing up for a week. Binge watch those awful shows you can’t resist. Take some time out of your day to do something for you. Treat yourself to a hot bath or shower, or that glass of wine you’ve been putting off because you don’t have a good reason. Relax and accept that it is what it is and that you’ll come back to it later. 

Check in with yourself. Almost all creative types—artists, actors, writers—have higher numbers of mental illness like anxiety and depression. The reasons behind that are a little murky, but the numbers speak for themselves. If you’re blocked, it might just be because your mental health is dropping. Check in with yourself and be honest. Anxiety and depression can do a lot worse damage than just dry up your creativity. You can take that from someone who has experience with anxiety. Check your health, both mental and physical.

Motivate yourself. Sometimes the biggest problem for a writer suffering from block is fear. Maybe we think we’re not good enough. Maybe we think we’ll be rejected. Whatever the case may be, we’re still fighting writer’s block. It might be an idea to set up a couple of prompts and spend ten minutes free writing to help you get moving again. Find a way to motivate yourself—be that through a sprint or through gentle encouragement. Some of us work well under pressure, but sometimes that pressure can make us crumple.

Change something. This might be your space or your routine. If you’re more of a plotter, throw your outline out the window. Find a random prompt and splash it down as the next sentence of your story. Build from it. If you’re a pantser, try sitting down and doing some light plotting to see what gets moving. If that doesn’t work, try moving your space around.

Find a cheerleader. If you’re finding it hard to get any writing done, don’t feel bad—you might just need a little more support! If you have a writer’s group you can turn to, ask if someone doesn’t mind being a cheerleader for you. This can range from an in-depth discussion of their favorite character, to reader comments on your current draft. If you don’t have a writing group, now might be a good time to get one. Writing in itself is often a lonely venture, and loneliness can make even our favorite tasks unenjoyable.

Posted in blogging

Creating Blog Ideas

Posted on by AJ

If you’ve thought about blogging at all, one of the big questions you might have is where you’ll get ideas for it all. You can only post so many times on the same things before you run out of ideas, right?

The good news is that while you might have a limited number of ideas, there are easy ways to find new ideas, and to help make your current ideas fit newer posts.

Expand. If you have a general idea—such as character development, or plotting for a particular genre—consider expanding on that general idea and getting into details and specific aspects of it. Do you want to discuss the exposition, or the climax? Perhaps you want to discuss some common plot twists to your genre. Think to how character development impacts their arc, or where to start developing characters. Look at your general ideas and make some notes. What are more topics you can expand on?

Series. It’s much easier to keep posting regularly if you have a series you can work from. This might be something like ten great recipes with potatoes, or historical accountings of metalwork from medieval times up to modern usage. If you work better with a plan, this is a great option! You can break each topic down onto a particular area you want to cover and plot them out over time. If you have a large topic with a lot to cover, you can also use this topic as a ‘filler’ when you don’t have time to write an in depth post on something else but want to maintain consistency.

Free Write. If you’re absolutely out of ideas, set a timer for ten minutes or so, pick a topic and splash some words down. Don’t worry if they come out with any sort of cohesiveness, you’re not doing anything more than spewing words out to get your thoughts turning. Once the timer is done, set it aside for a bit, maybe go edit another post or play with a page you need to update. Come back to it in an hour and see what sort of gems are hidden in your free write. Did you find a connection between two subjects you didn’t expect? Perhaps you can see a good base of a post.

Keep Tabs. If you notice a topic is trending—i.e. it’s cropping up on multiple other blogs or keeps recurring in the news—it’s not a bad idea to write up a post on your thoughts on it. Even if you never share that particular post, it can help you find new ideas by giving you a place to write down your questions. Those questions can be researched later, and a more informative post can be shared on the answer to that particular question.