Each month I come up with twelve article ideas for my Sunday| Mag writers. That’s on top of my twelve topics I personally blog about. Plus any articles I post for my other three sites. Plus any guest posts I do on other blogs. That amounts to about 30-40 ideas each month.
Do I get writer’s block—ideas block—when I sit down to think about what to write? You bet I do. Yesterday I had to plan six article ideas and I had absolutely nothing in my brain.
But an hour later, my six ideas were together and I felt good about them. How did I push through the block and make it happen? I believed I’d get through it.
I think so many times when we feel creatively dry, we start thinking we’ve come to our creative end. We’ve thought up every good idea we’ll possibly have, and we assume the ideas won’t come to us. We start stressing about the idea that we think we’re through, and we cease to focus on the problem.
The problem is simple—coming up with a single idea—but we make it bigger and more complicated. We see the hundreds of ideas we’ll never have because we’re blocked, instead of focusing on the one idea we need right now.
So I calmed down. I reminded myself I wasn’t finished. I had more ideas inside, I just needed to find them. So I focused on getting one idea. I used the thesaurus, searched through old articles, searched the web. Something sparked an idea inside of me then I wrote it down.
Then I moved onto the next idea. Then onto the next.The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step (Lao Tzu). And unless we believe we can take that step, we’ll never do it.
So how do you get through writer’s block? One step at a time. You just have to take the step and believe you’ll make it.
