Holy moly! A new year. A new decade. Both come with excitement, motivation, and promise. But they also come with stress. If you’re like most people, you didn’t get a lot of writing done during the holidays. Either you were enjoying a house filled with friends and family, filling someone else’s house with holiday cheer, or hanging out at home stuck in a sugar rush-crash-rush-crash cycle.
However you spent your holidays, jumping back into a writing routine, or even just thinking about it, can make you anxious. You want to write, you’re energized, you may even have a work-in-progress waiting for you. But after going back to work and fighting with the kids about going back to school, you find the creative juices have evaporated.
Don’t worry, they will come back. The trick is… start small.
What does that mean? Before you set unattainable deadlines of writing or revising a 100,000 word young adult fantasy novel by February, try a few of these first.
- Fifteen-minute writing sessions – if you know you’re only at your desk for a short amount of time, take the pressure to write or revise hundreds or thousands of words away. Start with one page, maybe two.
- Change your tools – most people write on a computer. It’s quick, convenient, and has all the tools literally at your fingertips. But it also allows for easy editing and blocks the creative flow. Put away the keyboard and pull out a paper and pen. Knowing you cannot edit forces you to let those ideas and words flow.
- Change projects (temporarily) – even if you are in the middle of a project put it away for now. The pressure to keep up the momentum you had before the break can be overwhelming and may cause you to discard it altogether. Instead, jot ideas for a new story (I know you have ideas lurking in the shadows of your brain) try free-writing, or one of these prompts. 1. Write down random thoughts on charity 2. Open an imaginary door. What do you see? 3. Use this first line: A boy walks into a school. But it isn’t a school.
- Look around – find an image that catches your attention, it can be anything from a shadow to a piece of paper skipping across the ground. Now write about it. Not only will this spark creativity, it will also help with your power of observation. A necessary tool for writers.
- Play a game – Apples to Apples is a game of words. With 749 red noun cards and 249 green adjective cards, picking three or four can give you a fun way to generate ideas. Not sure what to do? Here are four random cards from my Apples to Apples game. Use them all in a paragraph: Underwear. X-Rays, Pit Bulls, Clueless.
These exercises are sure to get the dust off your brain cells and you can use them anywhere and anytime. After a long break, if you have writer’s block, or if you want to play around with new ideas.
I would love for you to share your tips for getting the spark back after a long break, and if any of these tricks helped you, please share what you wrote.
Happy writing everyone!
