Twenty Ways to Deal with Writer’s Block

1.  Moan, groan and complain that you have nothing left to write about. Use a very dramatic voice for more effect. If you can conjure up some tears, it will totally add to the “poor me” effect.

2. Sit down and try to write again. Start and throw out 10 essays.

3. Ask all your writing friends for ideas on how to get over this annoying block.  Love the ideas about unplugging from the computer and walking away from writing. Hate the ideas about having to just sit down and write because if there is one thing you don’t want to do to get over your block, it’s write.

4. Remind yourself that your friends are talented writers, feel intimidated, quit writing, take up underwater basket weaving.

5. Spend some time thinking about whether or not there really is something called underwater basket weaving or was it just something your high school choir director would tell you would be your major in college because clearly you would never be good enough for anything else.

6. Go into kitchen where family is eating a late lunch and beg husband for an idea.

7. Get into argument with husband when he tells you that the only way through your writer’s block is to sit down and write. If you feel up to it, throw back in his face all you have done to help him over the twenty years you have been married.

8. Plead with all three of your children for an idea, any idea.

9. Dismiss the eleven-year-old’s suggestion of writing about princesses and the eight-year-old’s idea of writing about his deep fear of animals. Not because they are not good ideas, but because you have already written about them

10. Decide that you have exhausted everything in your life to write about and that you are a complete failure as a writer. You might want to throw in a few more minutes of deep self pity here, but that’s only a suggestion.

11. Get another cup of coffee.

12. Look around for a snack that is only 2 points with Weight Watchers because you blew 5 points on the chocolate that you swore would end your writer’s block. Sadly it did not.

13. Start to get not-so-secretly annoyed by 14-year-old son, who has clearly become too much like his father when he laughingly suggests writing about the “Harlem Shake.”

14. Now that husband is laughing along with son, go ahead and give the man a very dirty look. Make note of the fact that he gives son secret hand sign to let the poor child know he better quit teasing his mother because husband knows his wife and he knows that any minute she is going to eat her firstborn.

15. Go into your office, which is really just a small corner of the bedroom, and look at the blank computer screen. Again.

16. Change the radio station from the soft pop station to the one devoted to songs of the 70s.  Maybe listening to the same songs that you did as a child will spark a memory.

17. Listen to a song from Jim Stafford and realize that the song is about growing and smoking pot. Start wondering if your conservative parents knew what this song was about and if they did why did they let you listen to it when you were just a little girl?

18. Start thinking maybe you don’t know your parents as well as you think you do.

19. Make mental note to mention this fact the next time they question your parenting skills because you let your youngest child watch Friends with you and your 14 year old.

20. When all of that fails to work, write an essay about the ways that you deal with writer’s block.