Content Unlimited and the Dreaded Writers’ Block

If you are a content writer and have been writing for years, then I am sure you would have encountered the dreaded writers’ block. Churning articles for the print media or the online media is not easy. Especially when you are just starting out on a career in content, you are expected to write several scores of articles on various topics, and it is very easy to arrive at a complete shutdown of ideas.

As an author also, you could risk stumbling at crucial parts of your story, and just cannot seem to move any further in a way desired by your satisfaction. What do you do?

Let us understand what writers’ block is first.

Writers thrive on creativity. Creativity basically means to come up with new ideas and new ways to represent a story or an article. Creativity also implies saying something mundane in an innovative way, just like it happens in advertising.

When something like this happens, it is really alarming and upsetting, especially when you have deadlines to stick to.

What does one do, as a content writer, to combat such a writers’ block?

Whether we are writing for the web or for the book, we have to keep our creative juices flowing. When it comes to the web, content writers of today have to take care of so many things. It’s not enough to dish out a ‘good’ article with the use of high class vocabulary. Content writing for the Millennials is all about keywords, density, search engine optimization, packing the punch, marketing for the machine, digital, info graphics et al.

Here are a few tips for you to help you ease yourself out of that infamous writers’ block effortlessly:

• The moment you realize you have a block, S.T.O.P. Leave everything, no matter how tight the deadline. Just stop, and take a deep breath. Get up and go out for a short walk. Just get away from work.
• If you are into meditation, try visualizing during your meditation sessions.
• If you aren’t the meditating kind, understand that you need to calm the crows inside your mind to concentrate on the stuck piece of written work. So, try counting numbers backward until there are no thoughts in your head. Slowly, get back to where you got stuck.
• Deconstruct the constructed. Supposing you were writing content for a website, and the block struck. Deconstruct what you have written till now.
• On a white board, list down the important areas to cover, mark the topics already addressed.
• Try writing exercises – for example, choose a random page out of a random book, and start a new story with a random line in the page. Do it for the sake of helping the creative juices flow.
• Relax… it is very important to have all your faculties working at the topmost order. So, when faced with a block, de-stress, relax, go for a pampering session. Whatever you do, relax.
• If you are still unable to move ahead, you can try leaving that portion of the story and deal with another part of it – the subsequent outcome might bring about an idea you were looking for at the previous milestone.
• When short of ideas for articles, or if you have written so much that you don’t really know what to write on anymore, the best way to go ahead is to see trending topics and add on your own to them. Trending topics are always changing. For example, even as I am writing this, the current trending topic on Twitter is LCD TVs. How? Why? One never knows. Just capitalize on it. Your next post could be a well-researched topic on the LCD technology. Or one on the marketing strategy of the biggest LCD brand.

Overcoming the writers’ block is not as tough as it looks. Try these tips the next time you encounter one, and let us know if they worked for you.

And if you have your own little trick that pulls you out of the block, do share with us in the comments section below.

Also, if none of these tips work, contact us to see how we can help you fulfill your content needs.