“I wrote an article about writer’s block to get rid of my writer’s block”
Say amen if you’ve ever said this:
“I don’t know what to write or paint or sketch! Help!”
Well then, you have stumbled upon the correct article. I have just the thing for you. Just like everyone on Quora, I’m extremely qualified to help you. This piece of “writing” – that totally didn’t sound like a teleshopping advertisement you’ll find on family friendly TV channels after 11pm – will teach you how to overcome that very psychological barrier that prohibits you from thinking clearly and manifest your thoughts into Art. Plus you’ll get a free roti maker if you call us NOW!
Here are some tips that might be the remedy to the artist equivalent of a common cold. At least our suffering is mutual.
1.Take a Walk: Whenever you’ve been hit in the wrong places, people always said “Don’t worry, just walk it off, you’ll be fine” to make you leave their presence immediately. Similarly, you just need to treat an Artist’s block as one strike in the place where the sun don’t shine and just “walk it off”. A good walk outdoors could always restart your brain and make it function like you wanted it to in the first place. A visit you make to good ol’ mother nature will always be beneficial for you as an artist. Astonishingly, as you come back home, your mind will just start to puke fresh new ideas and content that you could splash on that piece of paper that you hated for being empty. The basic mechanism of this method is: In your trip to the Outdoors, you will see a lot of things that you usually don’t see at home, school or office- assuming you’re doing something productive with your life. All of this is potential content. So if brain.exe has stopped working, just take a walk
2. Hang out with other people: A change of faces you see and interact with can be advantageous, given the fact that the number of people you interact with is directly proportional to the different perspectives you learn. This loosely translates to “The more you meet, the more you think”. Meeting a new person or a long lost friend could give you a lot of insight, that you might extract from the conversation you have. And with that useful(/useless) knowledge you might just paint or write something. How else do you think Mona Lisa was painted (keeping all the conspiracy theories aside)? It’s not like some dude just woke up and painted a woman because he felt like it. Maybe you could make art out of how tired you are with constantly having to interact with people who suck the soul out of you? Who knows! Call up your most distant friend to remember why you’re distant with them in the first place! My editor thinks it is a good idea!! How!!! Nice!!!!
3. Self Inspiration: The one person that can and should inspire you when everyone else fails to do so is… (perspective narcissism alert) you. Yeah, I’m not even kidding. When you’ve encountered a block, just put yourself in third person and admire your previous works and believe in yourself. This might not instantly give you cool new ideas and thoughts, but it may put you on a pedestal which would make you more capable of thinking of cool new ideas. Make sure you snap out of this state before you step out because you don’t want to be in third person while on the streets. Unless it’s Sesame Street and you’re Elmo referring to yourself in third person. And that show is supposed to be educational.
4. Snooze Button: A walk might restart your brain, there is another way you can do the same. If you want to truly reboot your brain, you have to force-reboot it. Just hold your power-button down for a minute and go to sleep. If your block was on account of lack of sleep, this might just do the trick. However, this doesn’t imply that you go to sleep every time you have to write, paint, sketch or whatever.
5. Freestyle: Sometimes you think you’re out of ideas and are literally two-fingers in in forcing your brain to vomit some material on that piece of paper, but none of that works. Quick tip, a lot of “stimulants” might actually make you vomit something; Ernest Hemingway and every musician ever swore by it(Ernest Hemingway should have stuck to something more hydrating though) oh wait, we just realised that some of our dear readers may be below 21 (and don’t have fake IDs). And if in a scenario like that, you would probably want to just start writing/painting/sketching etc. without thinking. It could be any random thing. You could write about your day or someone else’s, or perhaps write about waffles or paint a pancake, anything and everything. This helps to take your mind off a lot of things and could very well turn out to be something beyond what you expected. At times, breaking limits (–and laws!) can be fun.
Lastly, if all this fails, you could probably just sit back and write an article teaching dimwits on the internet “how to overcome artist blocks”.