BOP Your Way Past Writer’s Block – Part 3

(Note: This is the third of a three-part series. You can see part 1 here and part 2 here.)

3.    Put it into practice.
Doing these two things will not help your writer’s block if you do them only once. They have to become a regular habit. Traditional wisdom says if you do something 14 days or 14 times, it becomes a habit. Make doodling and playing a habit.

Find people you trust to help you stay accountable to yourself and your new habits until they become so ingrained for you that missing them feels like missing a meal or another vital part of your life.

These aren’t original to me. Julia Cameron discusses them in detail in The Artist’s Way. She calls the notebook exercise “Morning Pages” and says they are to be done in the morning before doing anything else. She doesn’t make allowances for easing into them.

Additionally, she calls the organized play an “Artist Date” where only the inner and outer artist are involved and no one else goes along because they could cause interruptions or be a distraction. Sometimes it’s good to go somewhere alone and just be in order to recharge. At other times, it feels dull without someone with similar goals there as well. In my opinion, that’s your own judgment call. The only requirement is that it works for you regardless of what anyone else says about it and regardless of what rules they would impose on it.

Too many times we tend to discount something because it’s too simple. Many of us do that with these three, seemingly simple, things. If we don’t discount them, they can become valuable tools allowing us to BOP our way through any blocks we find in our path. And eventually our “Good Fairy” will reward us with increased productivity and confidence to submit our work instead of punishing us as she did with poor Little Bunny Foo Foo.

BOP Your Way Past Writer’s Block – Part 1

(Note: This is the first in a 3-part series about overcoming writer’s block or any obstacle to your creativity.)

Advice for writers comes from varied and sometimes surprising sources. Take nursery rhymes, for example. Particularly, consider Little Bunny Foo Foo.

“Little Bunny Foo Foo,
Hopping through the forest
Scooping up the field mice
And boppin’ ’em on the head.”

If you’re not familiar with the nursery rhyme, the Good Fairy gave Little Bunny Foo Foo three chances to improve his behavior or she would turn him into a goon. Ultimately, she did.

We writers need to change our behavior as well. We need to know we can bop our way past writer’s blocks without such punishment. Here are three tips for doing just that:

1.    Break out the pen and paper.
Yes, we live in the Information Age where everyone uses a computer more often than not. We even carry them in our pockets under the guise of music players and smart phones. Forget about them. Get a physical notebook and pen. It doesn’t matter if you use a 3-ring binder or a spiral notebook or if you write with blue, black, green, yellow, or purple ink.

Get a notebook and a pen, find a place to sit down, and set a timer for at least fifteen minutes. It would be better if you can do it for 30, but we’ll start with 15. In those 30 minutes, you should be able to fill 3 8.5×12 sheets of paper: front and back of one page and front of another (or back, depending on how you work).

As soon as you start the timer, put your pen to paper and do not stop moving the pen across the page until the timer goes off. You don’t have to write if you can’t think of anything to say, but you do have to keep the pen moving. Doodle. Draw. Scribble. Eventually, you will start to write something. And that something might just help you move past your block and the problem you’ve been having.

In fact, consider your blocks as building blocks toddlers littering a toddler’s playroom. Draw a representation of those blocks in your notebook while your hand is moving across the page during this block of time. If the toys were scattered everywhere, how might they be rearranged to make something decorative if not functional?

In the same way you imagine those toy blocks being moved around, rearrange your blocks too. Play “What if?” You don’t write fiction, you say. It doesn’t matter. Many writers have found “what if” to generate effective jump-starts for articles and other nonfiction projects. Nita Beshear, a writer in southeast Oklahoma, did. She took her passions for quilts and writing and thought, “What if I wrote a book of devotions about quilts?” She wrote Devoted to Quilting, published by Devoted Books in 2010.

(Part 2)

In Defense of Creativity

(From a speech given at Torchlighters Toastmasters on September 20, 2010.)

I am going to make some assumptions here. I assume you have children. I assume those children are in school and have some access to art and music classes. I also assume you are aware of the cutbacks schools are facing. Art and music programs are being cut back if not completely canceled. Programs like VH1’s Save the Music work to keep this from happening to music programs.

Where are the champions for the other arts? For that matter, why is creativity not included in the classroom as a whole instead of relegated to the art room?

During a lecture in Monterey, California, in February 2006, Sir Ken Robinson said:

“We are educating people out of their creative capacities.”

Later in the same lecture, he said:

“Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not because everything they were good at in school wasn’t valued or was actually stigmatized.”

Creativity should be part of our everyday lives, not pushed aside because there are more “worthy” subjects to study or things to do. It is not confined to writing, art, dancing, and the like. It also includes cooking, gardening, teaching, and parenting, just to name a few. We need what Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, and Twyla Tharp, author of The Creative Habit, call “everyday creativity.”

If schools don’t think creativity is important enough to include in the classroom, someone needs to pick up where they leave off. Ideally, that would be parents, but they often have the same idea that the schools do that creativity is frivolous.

Quite the contrary. Creativity is vitally necessary.

While children are in the music room learning how to read notes or in the art room learning about shadows and contouring and color theory, they’re also learning how to evaluate problems and figure out solutions on the fly. If these programs are eliminated from the curriculum, being merely electives and not core courses, where do students learn those skills? How do they learn the everyday creativity necessary for day-to-day living?

A couple months ago, Newsweek reported on America’s creativity crisis. When I first heard about that, I poo-poo’ed it. When I read the article, I had to agree. Our creativity scores are going down. In large part, that’s because of the amount of time kids spend watching TV and playing video games.

In a grant I have applied for, I put forth a proposal for a program that includes in-person workshops, online courses, and books (including The Idea Pocket) that would help take up some of the slack in the area where I live (and anywhere I may travel).

Will it be enough? By myself, no, but it will be a start.

Intentions

I am on vacation this week. Well, since Wednesday, so it hasn’t been all week. Still, it counts.

I brought some writing-related things, intending to work on them and to work on Navajo Rose. So far, I haven’t.

I remind other people they need to refill their creative well, but lately, I haven’t been doing that myself. I’ve been working on day job stuff, sending out queries, and writing. The writing has been getting harder than necessary. I should have recognized that clue immediately that I needed to take some time to refill my well.

I’m at Robbers Cave State Park in Wilburton, Oklahoma. It’s beautiful. My own intentions of writing aside, I’ve been swimming, hiking, taking pictures, and just observing.

It’s what I needed in so many ways.

I have a new 3-subject notebook. With as much writing as I have been doing lately, actually since last October, I think I’m going to try morning pages again. Previously I didn’t do them because if I wasn’t writing — and I wasn’t much — I felt like the three pages in the morning got my writing in for the day. I’ll see if it works better for me this time around.

(If you don’t know, “morning pages” is an exercise used and recommended by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way to get the garbage out first thing in the morning so you’ll be open to creativity and inspiration throughout the day.)

At the very least, I understand better how I work now than I did then, so I won’t let myself use the “I already wrote today when I did morning pages” as an excuse.

So…

Excuse me while my subconscious asserts itself into the conscious world and takes me back out on its intentions to refill my creative well.