When You Need It

Anyone who has done anything creative for an extended period of time will eventually experience some form of dry spell or innovation lapse.

It simply comes with the territory.

As a writer, I'm very familiar with creative droughts. I stared at the blank screen this morning for an inordinately long time as my mind was blank trying to come up with my first Entrepreneur article for the new year.

Thankfully, I was a news reporter years ago with multiple deadlines throughout the day and had to deal with writer’s block regularly. I got kind of used to it.

You might think it would have been easy to write about news makers and “the news of the day” but that was not always the case, especially when I was assigned a low interest, low visual, low emotional story about something like a county drainage proposal, rezoning considerations or tax easement issue. Ugh!

I don’t care if you write like Hemingway and Edward R. Murrow combined, such assignments challenge even the best writers. I soon discovered it was easier to write about what I cared about. The best strategy for me was to come to the daily editorial meetings with my own story ideas to pitch to my editors and hope management would let me cover at least one of those ideas that day.

However, that was easier said than done. Coming up with two or three different and interesting story ideas each day is a challenging creative exercise. What I did, and continue to do today, to break through the creative block workers for any creative process.

1. Consider publications, ideas and opinions with which you philosophically disagree.
The intent here would be to get a spark or kernel of a concept that might be flipped on its head into an interesting angle for a story or new product idea. For example, perhaps a health teacher was passing out condoms to elementary-age students because she believed preteen kids were "going to have sex anyway.”

2. Stream-of-conscious writing.
While it sounds weird, this can be a very effective breakthrough tactic. When I don’t know what to write or where to begin I’ll just start writing the first things that come to mind.

3. Take a break.
Get up, stretch, do some Qigong, take a quick walk –- do something. In much the same way that a computer seizes up and needs a reboot, my creative CPU acts the same way sometimes. Often a quick change of scenery or light physical activity provides a useful reset to the creative system.

Source: entrepreneur

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