ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR INSPIRATION?

Are You a Beginner Writer Struggling with Writer`s Block?

Those are the 4 most efficient strategies to never run out of ideas and write happily ever after

Writer's block is a dreaded reality for any writer and even some of the most known writers fought their battles with this multi-headed monster. When it comes to the head of“not having inspiration” I found my way to cut it and burn its growing source for good.

And this becomes incredibly easy when we identify and start to use all the incredible sources of inspiration all around us. Here are the most obvious ones:

The first source of inspiration is our life

The first source of inspiration is our life. Everything that stays with us long enough to think about before falling asleep is a potential article.

Why even bother to write something that we do not care about? Chances are that if we find your subject dull and uninteresting we will need a lot of willpower to research and write it.

On the other hand, if the subject is something we cannot help but think about, we might find ourselves in the flowing zone at the very moment we start laying down the first words.

We move from being an anxiously idea-hunter to an idea-gardener. There might be a lot of impatience from time to time, but the time will come when every step in our inner world of ideas will have some yield for us.

The second source of inspiration is our work itself

Yes, there is entirely possible to find inspiration in the very thing we need the inspiration for. How awesome this can be?

The trick to make this an easy walk is to write with love, to be passionate about writing. And if you think this sounds like a Perpetuum Mobile scenario, you are right. And it is better than the one theoretically achieved with a cat and a slice of bread and butter fixed on its back because it is real and no animal would be harmed in pursuing it. 🙃

Imagine this scenario: I am wondering what to write about and choose my love for dancing. I might start with a story about my Tantra dancing classes. This would open the gate for so many memories that soon I would find myself in a Proustian chain of thoughts.

One memory would lead to another, and to another, and then to another… Some of them would return with such a force that I will have the urge to write about them. Any time I have this impulse, I pause and write down a note about that memory.

Sometimes the memory is so vivid that it comes directly with a title and some of the most important points. But even without this clarity, I know that it is something there that wants to be written. For the moment all I have to do is to write a sticky note to myself and post it on my writing board.

The more passionate we are, the more we want to write. The more we write, the more inspiration we find. Each subject that inspires us is a rich deposit of still undiscovered and unexploited ideas.

If mankind has not yet discovered Perpetuum Mobile it is only because it does not know where to look for it:

Work is love in action.

The third source of inspiration is our “working place” — Medium

If you are a member and you are not too happy about your returns and consider quitting I would venture to suggest keeping your account for a determined period of time at your choice and committing yourself to the challenge of giving the best you with each of your articles.

You might be pleasantly surprised by yourself at the end of that period and not want to quit anymore.

If you are a beginner writer and you are not yet a Medium member, I gently suggest that becoming one might be one of the best decisions you can make. Here are the two most important reasons why.

Medium is a great source of inspiration.

Googling how many articles are published daily on Medium, the answer was 20,000 articles per day. Even if just a fifth of them are good enough to catch our interest, this still means 4000 articles.

I do not have any statistics about the quality of the articles published here, but this does not discourage me.

I do not know how many articles I am reading per day, but I read a lot and there is not even one day without finding something so interesting that I want to write an article as an answer to what I am reading.

I have to be careful and write down the subjects and or find a better way to manage those gems because on any given day my browser looks like this:

I keep those articles in open tabs until I found it hard to navigate between them.

And, except from the article I am writing, all the individual Medium tabs opened are carrying ideas for more new articles.

Medium is a huge writing club.

Each comment, positive or not, is a possibility to learn from interacting with other writers. They take time to tell us what they like and (hopefully) what they do not like. And, while I am enormously grateful for the positive ones, the real “flesh” is in the negative ones.

I appreciate the later ones a lot, no matter if they are constructive or not. Is easy to understand why I appreciate the constructive ones.

But believe it or not, I appreciate also the rude ones. Those are the ones that tell me I`d hit a sensitive point. They give me the opportunity to practice my sarcastic zen cuss and to grow more resilient.

And they made me question a lot of things within a wide area of interest, from human nature to trauma and spirituality so there is a great chance I would come up with new ideas.

In addition to commenting, there is the possibility to highlight. I saw articles saying that is rude to do that so I am trying to keep it to a minimum. Nevertheless, when somebody is highlighting something in my article I take it as a “striking point”.

This means that the reader found that part interesting enough to highlight it. If not else, it is worth thinking about why? This alone can give us more ideas to write about.

Wrapping up, here is how to never run out of ideas:

1. Write about something you are passionate about.

And even If you are passionate about something others are finding boring, this is great, because boring subjects are a great source of income according to this very informative article written by Cristopher Kokosi

Aside from being informative and a challenge for me — I need to find my “boring niche” it is also a beautiful example of an article written as an answer to readers' reactions.

2. Write down anything that bothers you

Look at it as an opportunity to write about. You might be surprised by the therapeutic effect of writing about something you consider the most shameful/painful experiences in your life.

Here you have a beautifully written article by Nicole Hilbig about how writing can become our Self-Therapy:

More, you never know how your stories can help others to heal and inspire them to find their path.

3. Use your own work, your own articles to ask new questions.

After you press “Publish” use the “Listen” feature to listen to your story. Try to listen like it was written by somebody else.

Suspend that rude inner critic voice that might try to put you down. If you need, visualize yourself as you are using a switch to activate your creative and playful part. Pretend that is your best friend that wrote that story. Somebody you love and care for.

And write down all the suggestions and questions you have for her/him.

Each of those suggestions and questions might be a start for another article.

4. Actively search for challenges

With so many Medium publications, we cannot complain we lack challenges.

I found so many that now I have to focus on rapidly improving my writing skills because as a non-native English speaker I need a lot of time for each of my articles.

Here is the one I hope I will manage to write for this weekend:

And here is another one I found while searching for the one above.

Fun fact, even writing this I wrote down three more ideas. Wich, I believe, proves that my strategies are working.

I would be happy to learn about your strategies to beat writers' block. If you have any questions and suggestions feel free to comment. I hope you find my article useful.

Thank you for reading. 🙂

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