How to get over writers block in ten min or less.

You stare blankly at your screen. That little black line blinking on and off, a frustrating reminder that your mind is blank, your writing is stuck, and you’ve got no inspiration.

Writers block. That evil devil of impossibility.

So what do you do? Take a walk, come back to it in a day, sleep it off?

Why waste so much time when you need to get that thing written right now.

Let me tell you how.

Get a timer and write.

Now you may be saying to yourself. What? But I have writers block how is that going to help?

The trick is in how you write, not what you write. It’s called free writing.

Open a blank document, set the timer for 10 min, and write. You are not allowed to stop those fingers clicking on the keyboard. Don’t go back and fix your spelling, don’t go back and fix your punctuation, don’t go back and fix the crap that you just wrote. Cage your self-editor and don’t let her out. Let the thoughts flow from your mind like water from a waterfall, crashing recklessly to the rocks of the white page below. Even if you end up writing. ‘I can’t think of anything to write.’ Write it.

To show you what I mean here is an example of one of my free writes.

“Holy cow this is the hardest thing to over come. AHHHHH this is hard i need to come up with a story other than the out line

Begining the need to brake someone out of jail but he doesn’t know that he is doing it what does this jail look like is it just one room or is it a large complex. I think it is just one room like they had in the old west stories. So there is a prison bars and bench but it is empty. “

Notice the miss spelled word, the lack of some punctuation, and the fact that it hardly makes any sense. Forget everything but writing. Let your fingers and your mind wander to where ever it goes. Let yourself get on tangents, your mind will open up and write you the goods.

Since I’ve used this technique I haven’t had writers block for longer than 10 min. My free writing material wanders too much to use in my actual novel, but I always solve whatever problem I’ve come up against.

Didn’t solve the problem in the first 10 min? No problem set the timer and start again.

Try it out, post below about how it does or doesn’t work for you.





For more information on free writing check out this book.