Here I am, the stage is ready, the room is full, the spotlights are pointed at me, the audience is agitated waiting for my first words, the tension can be cut with a knife, the show must begin and I… simply blank, I don't know what to say, I would like to be an ostrich and hide my head in the ground or just ask Mr. Spock to teleport me to the USS Enterprise. Oh my God, only these things happen to me ... or not?
Perhaps my introduction has been somewhat theatrical, but I am sure that on more than one occasion you have sat behind your computer with all the firm intention of writing a post worthy of Cervantes or Mark Twain, and yet at the time of writing nothing flows, you feel incapable of generating a good idea, you think that the muse abandoned you, your worst nightmare has come true: writer's block trapped you.
What is writer's block?
Although the term refers to the inability of a writer to continue a literary work in development, it can also be applied to any creative work, be it a painting, a sculpture, a song, and of course… a post.
I am not going to overwhelm you with technicalities or psychological studies, of which I do not have any kind of professional knowledge, by the way, but I will just mention what I consider to be the most common reasons that can generate that at a certain moment we get "stuck" in our ideas.
• Tiredness: our brain is just another muscle, a good workout makes it stronger and stronger, but it also needs to rest. Without rest, exhaustion is generated which allows us to be creative.
• Excessive perfectionism: we demand so much of ourselves that whatever topic we can think of to write, we end up thinking that we won't have enough capacity to develop it.
• Lack of knowledge of the topic: this happens when we have a predetermined idea of a topic we want to write about, but… we don't know anything about it.
Why try to write about what you don't know if there are so many things in which you are a genius?
• Need to satisfy very high expectations: when we focus too much on what readers will think about what you intend to write and consider that it is a demanding public, you may not want to risk your reputation and prefer to protect yourself in the safety of your "intellectual drought ”.
• You do not like what you write: perhaps this last point covers all the previous ones, but I am not referring to the way you write or the creative process you are carrying out, I mean when you force yourself to write about a topic with which you do not you feel comfortable.
If you don't feel comfortable with a topic, just don't write about it.
We are bloggers, not literati or copywriters
The first thing to keep in mind when writing is that no one expects us to write an article worthy of a Pulitzer or a literary work that deserves a novel, it is not pleased that our blog is more like a digital magazine or a marketing campaign than to space where we can let our ideas flow.
I consider that being a blogger is precisely that, allowing yourself to express yourself, to let what we carry flow, talk about our realities, our values, our ideas (no matter how stupid they may seem), and of course about our experiences daily.
No one expects more from you than yourself
Do not stress so much thinking about what to write to please the audience, allow yourself to simply stand in front of your readers and expose what you feel, tell us about how your day was, what you think about a certain topic, about that great movie that you enjoyed with your partner or that interesting, great and captivating article from cough, cough! Karupanocitizen xD that you couldn't stop reading.
Think that how you feel when writing will be reflected in what you write, so what you should be most concerned about is not the topic you are going to develop or what your readers will think about it, but how you feel about it. regarding what you want to write. Do you feel comfortable? Does it make you feel good? Do you enjoy it? Does it generate interest or does it feel like a great burden? These are some of the questions you should ask yourself before starting to write anything, your main source of inspiration must be yourself ... never forget it.
My secret to interesting, cool and captivating post (no whale will resist)
Well… I think I was a bit of an exaggeration with this last subtitle! xD, but I can't leave without at least offering you my experience and my techniques to overcome writer's block, it's not that it happens to me very often, by the way, only every time I sit down to write ...
I believe that our daily events are one of the most important sources to inspire us to write, no matter how monotonous and uninteresting our life may seem, believe me, there will always be an invaluable experience or learning that you can show us, you just have to see yourself as the character. the main part of a story, observe what happens to you, what you learned, what you felt, and try to write it as a narrator. When you sit down to write instead of thinking: what do I write?, think better: what would I like to say? I'm sure a good topic will appear!
Don't you believe me? well, you can see my last three posts for this community, this one I wrote because I thought there were not enough comments on my posts, this other one because I was very lazy to write, but I knew I had to do it and today… because I didn't know what to write about.
Now I would like to know how you deal with author blocking, has it happened to you before? What is your main source for creating content? What topics do you feel more comfortable writing about? come on, I want to read you! see you in the comments.
We keep reading!
