You just can’t make that short story sing. The grant you’re writing doesn’t seem to match the funding source’s rules and you KNOW it should. That letter to your old college roommate is too boring for words. Your boss keeps turning down your memos that explain what you think is a great idea for marketing campaigns. Chances are you need to look at things from a different direction. Writing, no matter if it’s fiction or technical, is a creative field. A year ago, I interviewed Belle, a writer who’d just been published for the first time in a national magazine—she was seven and a half years old. Belle had some good advice for writers of every age, when she said, “if you’re out of ideas, just go into the bath or take a walk or go swimming in a pool. Do something your really like, something relaxing so your mind can wander into the world of childhood.”
Here are some other ways to steer your thoughts in a creative new direction:
- Make a diagram or picture of it. Sometimes seeing it as a series of boxes and arrows helps. Or you can make a collage.
- Talk about it. Someone else may see it in a way you never thought of.
- Go to someone else’s creative endeavor, like an art gallery or play.
- Talk to a small child.
- Do something you’ve never done or rarely done. A few years ago I had an “Angel Reading” done, and it was just the sort of new and different thing I needed to open up an unexplored avenue.
- Read poems, if you don’t usually. Or the sports page, if that’s not something you ordinarily do.
Do whatever it takes for you to “wander in the world of childhood,” where creativity is a state of mind rather than a goal.
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