I have never considered myself a writer even though I've written many poems and articles, most of which have lived on my hard drive for years; that is until I discovered a website that would pay me lifetime royalties on anything I wrote. Just the words "lifetime royalties" were enough to get my attention, and get me uploading one of my articles from my hard drive to their site, immediately. They accepted my article and it has already started earning money for me, now and into the future.
I knew that one article alone would not be enough to earn me a good income; I also new that the articles on my hard drive were not really written with an internet audience in mind. Therefore I would have to start writing new stuff, frequently and prolifically.
The problem was, I had not written for years, I did not know what to write about, and I definitely was not feeling inspired to write about anything whatsoever.
I always thought inspiration had to be there in order to write a good piece and if it wasn't, then there was no point in beginning to put pen to paper, or rather fingers to keyboard. But that was where I was wrong.
I discovered that I do not need to feel inspired before starting to write. I discovered that inspiration can come after I have started writing.
If you are now asking yourself, “How do I get myself to write when I don't feel like writing in the first place?” Well, the answer lies in the words, “feel like writing”. Don't wait till you "feel" like writing; just start writing about anything and everything. It's about logging your thoughts onto paper or into your word processor, and since thinking is something we do 24 hours a day, all that is necessary is to write down some of those thoughts instead of letting them pass by without noticing them. Do not think about publication at this time. Just put some of your thoughts down onto paper.
- When you see something on TV that you found remarkable, write about it
- When you have an interesting conversation with someone, write about it
- When you have a meal that you really like or really dislike, write about it
- When you feel strong emotion about anything, write about it
This article began in exactly that way. I started to write about anything I felt like writing, I explored my interests, my conversations, the people around me, and I wrote about them. Doing this allowed me to accumulate many pages of my own writing quicker than ever before. Just being interested in that phenomenon, thinking about it and writing down my thoughts about it, gave me the inspiration for this article.
In conclusion, the key to defeating writer's block, in my opinion, is to first become more aware of the things that interest you and to then write about those things, without publication in mind. Once you start writing you will eventually find that one or more of your pieces of writing has the seed of an idea that could evolve into a successful article and make you a successful writer; one who can also say, “I've defeated writer's block for good.”
