Is there really a way to hammer our way through that terribly impenitrable brick wall of creative slump? That plane of existance all of us writers fear to face? Maybe there isn't a miracle-working cure for it that will make it vanish in an instant, but I've found a few ways that have managed to get the creative juices flowing a bit to be able to fight my way through it. Maybe they can help you battle the writer's block beast as well!
1. Listen to music (a particular kind of music, that is)
One thing that I love in the aesthetic/plotting/outlining part of writing a novel or short story is making a Spotify playlist! I'm sure you have your very own playlists filled with music that inspires your story, matches your characters' personalities and backstories, or just basically gives off the moodiness and vibes of your worlds and ideas. If you are stuck in a scene and don't know how to keep it moving along or even if you are stuck on chapter 1, closing your eyes while you immerse yourself in the sounds, lyrics, and voices of the music in your story's playlist will get your mind in the mood and mode of your world and characters. A lot of my scenes have even come from songs themselves! Movie/TV scores really help a lot with this, more so than regular lyrical songs do (in my opinion), because these songs are written for the exact purposes of following a scene, conjuring up emotions, and giving off cues to certain moments happening alongside them. I have gotten scenes from a lot of Hans Zimmer's scores simply by imagining my characters within his music and thinking up what they would be doing alongside the particular emotions conveyed in the sounds of the scores. Seriously, go make yourself a playlist right now inspired by your story!
2. Read a chapter or two from a book
Pick up a book still sitting in the TBR pile and flip through it to the beginning of a chapter. The scene taking place in that chapter might be a fight scene, a love scene, or simply an introspective interchange between two characters. Read it to feel the scene and listen to the words on the page. Imagine one of your characters as a character in the chapter's scene, stopping at different times within the scene to think about what might come next, how your character might react or what your character might say, or how the book's characters and your character might interact in that moment. Write down your imagined outcome/dialogue with your own characters in that scene as you would have it play out, then read what actually happens with the book characters as the author wrote it. It's sort of like fanficiton, right? I thoroughly believe that beginning writers need to start with fanfiction if they don't know where to start in tackling writing for the first time. Allowing ourselves to put our own OCs (original characters) into plots and scenes that have already been written for us or filling our original scenes with characters we are already familiar with can help us figure out dialogue, imagine new interactions, and fix plot holes in a familiar atmosphere as fanfiction allows us to be in. I actually formed one of the scenes in my book from a scene in Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. I had trouble thinking of what would come next between two of my characters, so I read one of Rice's scenes, put my OCs in the place of Lestat and Louis, read a few lines of dialogue and analyzed the scene, then thought about what I might write next—building upon the scene and the dialogue—and out came a new scene and dialogue loosely inspired by Rice's scene!
3. Watch a movie and take notes
This one is a bit similar to the suggestion above. I have the eternal curse of "writer brain" now where I can't watch a movie or read a book without analyzing its characterization and possible plot holes. So, for instance, I'll start watching Pulp Fiction, but end up stopping the movie thirty minutes in to analyze how Vincent and Jules interact as characters, try to figure out how the movie will end, and what I might borrow from it (well, turns out Pulp Fiction doesn't allow anyone to figure out where it's headed, and there's not a whole lot of specifics to borrow from it unless you are, of course, strictly writing pulp fiction). Any movie will do, especially a movie related to your genre and plot. It works similarly to the book borrowing tip I listed above. Watch the scene, pick out what worked in the scene and what didn't work, adjust the scene to your specifications, imagine your OCs in the movie characters' places and how they might react, and then allow your mind to wander and travel down roads leading off of the original scene to get to a place where you have your own, taking maybe one element from the movie's that you liked and that you want to work with.
4. Make a Pinterest board
Here's another fun procrastination excersice like the Spotify tip! And we, writers, always like procrastination, right? That's why we're always on Twitter while our blank Word docs stare back at us, abandoned and annoyed. That's okay. It's all for research and ideas anyway... at least that's what we tell ourselves. But, some procrastination is not procrastination at all and it truly does inspire us and our stories! One such form of this procrastination is Pinterest. Make a Pinterest board filled with images and aesthetics for your characters and scene ideas. Say you're righting a crime thriller. Looking up things like "gun aesthetic," "cold case aesthetic," or, quite simply, "crime aesthetic" will give tons of images that might add to the vibes of your story and can give you some ideas of what to write. The search might even give you images from scenes in movies or shows that can spark your inspiration. Adding images to a Pinterest board that you might not even know what to do with yet is also a great idea, because you can come back to them later and think about what you can do with it when writer's block hits. For instance, when I was writing my short story, "American Appetites," I pinned a picture of severed arms sticking out of a basket (weird and gruesome, yikes, I'm sorry, but I am a horror writer!). At the time, I had no idea what to do with a basket of arms, but I pinned it anyway to a story board. I came back to the image later on when I wanted to add a bit more horror into the story and when I was going through a bad case of writer's block with it. I saw the basket of arms image again and finally had my "aha!" moment. Then, I wrote a scene that resulted in that basket of arms, which ultimately ended up giving me another element of characterization with my monsters in the story. So, make a board, and pin to your aesthetic heart's content. Even pin that severed-arms-in-a-basket image for future reference.
5. Last one: Write at least one paragraph of whatever pops into your head (let your mind flow)
This one might seem kind of like a "yeah, Kristen, tried that. That's the whole point of a writer's block: I try to write and it doesn't work." Well, it might not work, that's true, but if you just allow your mind to flow and write whatever pops into your head (without thinking about your story), something great just might come out. Sit down at a blank document. Don't think about your story at all. Don't think about your characters. Don't think about your story's vibes. Simply start writing whatever comes to mind. It might be random lines of dialogue or a string of random words. Don't overthink any of it as you write all of it down. When you are finished, read back what you wrote and analyze it. Pick out the parts of it that you might be able to tuck away as something your character says or maybe something that happens to them. Think about what might happen next if your character says the words or sentences you wrote. For example, I was having a terrible time coming up with a short story to present to my college creative writing class for a grade. I had MAJOR writer's block to the point where I was about to just accept the zero for my grade and be on with my life. But instead, I decided to just write whatever popped into my brain (at the beginning of this, I did this as kind of a petty, angry way of just slamming my fingers on the computer keys in a fit of rage... you know, like when you just start writing "I HATE THIS. I HATE SCHOOL. I CAN'T WRITE!!!" over and over again instead of actually writing anything because you're so mad? Yeah, it started like that). Eventually, random words just started forming in my mind, so I typed them out. The words were: run, chirp, bubbles, breathing, keep them open, and stop. I read that back thinking, "okay, what the hell do I do with that ?" But, I tried to work with it. I formed all of it into a story about the inside of this male character's mind who I had conjured up. I made him keep repeating these words to himself over and over again at the start of each scene. Each word meant something to him. First, I came up with a scene to go with the word, "chirp." Out came this horrifying imagery of dead birds flying into a window by the thousands and walking up to the man with their broken necks and dead eyes. Where did THAT come from, right?? Simply from me working with the word, "chirp" and conjuring up all kinds of ways I could make that word horrifying for a horror story. Each of these words finally took on meaning as a story, and thus, "The Black Soul House" was born. When I turned it in for class, my professor even told me that it was outstanding and that he had no corrections to give me. Little did he know it had all started as random words on a blank page with no ideas in sight before I started writing it. So, let your mind flow. Write nonesense that will be nonesense to you at first... but then play around with that nonesense. It might just be your next masterpiece in the making!
I hope that all, or, at least, one of these tips can free you from writer's block hell! It is a truly awful place to exist, I know, believe me, but just remind yourself that you can't exist there for forever. One day, it will all come back and you will have your chance to slay that writer's block beast. All of these tricks have helped me slay mine, so I hope that they can help you, too. Don't forget that every writer has writer's block multiple times at some point or another (and if they say they don't, they are LYING). We all have to bear that burden of zero inspiration. You will get out of that creative crushing pit, and have a story you are proud of... you just have to be patient and stretch your mind more so than you had previously anticipated! Good luck!
And comment some of your own tips and tricks for writer's block!