Tips to combat writer's block

Wow, my first blog post and it is about writer's block. Who am I to be so presumptuous? I'm a regular guy who likes to write. Everyone can write and everyone has a story. The question is, how does one bring it to the page and how does one keep going once the two minutes of excitement runs out? Like one of my favorite teacher's Jack Kornfield says After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. What now? Your five minutes of ideas are on the page. Many writers have covered this subject and in my experience most want $19.99 to give me the secret to becoming John Grisham. I have also learned that if you have money and no experience, many times they switch places usually to our disappointment. I am not sure how much free advice is worth but I know you will not need to trade money for it and hopefully someone will find it useful. Here goes, for me I first think of a story I have heard or I want to tell. Let's say you grew up in Nepal as a child in a very small village. The fact is you don't even need to be the child who grew up there, just find it interesting and do some research. 1. Be creative. What the heck does that mean, I'm siting at a computer thinking about the grocery store not Nepal. 2. Focus one's mind. Oh great, I'm one of those guys but meditation is a great way to declutter the mind and generate pages. I don't mean move to an ashram. Just take a legal pad and sit at a desk for ten minutes doing nothing, not thinking, not doing. Write down everything that passes through your mind.3. Listen. It is amazing how much I can learn from observing my dog sitting with a ball or interacting with another dog, or watching a hawk soar, but only if I am actually listening and not waiting to do something else. So many times we are not listening but waiting for someone or something to stop so we can talk or act. We completely miss the idea by being distracted. 4. Distractions are not distractions if you are not annoyed, they are observations for one to create content. Being cut off in traffic has a story. Maybe the person was late to surgery to save a life. Waiting in a line behind an angry Mom because her husband is cheating on her or she is leaving him to run away for an abusive relationship. In summary, 1. Be Creative 2.Focus 3.Really listen and 4. Distractions have stories.

Hope you got your money's worth of experience of this.

JPD

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