Thinking is Hard

Do you ever feel like you’ve hit a wall? I’ve been getting that feeling a lot lately. I can write perfectly fine for a few days straight and then, *poof* a wall appears and I crash into it at full speed. Kind of painful, that. So what do you do when you’ve hit that magically appearing wall?

First I sit and stare for a while. Usually at the screen, sometimes at the wall, sometimes at the ceiling. It depends, really on how long I stare and how I’m feeling while I stare. There’s a mirror on the closet door at the end of my bed that I’ll stare at if I don’t mind looking at myself that day. While I stare I let my mind wander. Sometimes it goes somewhere, sometimes it doesn’t.

If my mind wanders nowhere in particular, I’ll switch to deviantART. Good old DA holds many treasures to be found from photography to fan fiction. I’ve found several rather inspiring pieces on DA and managed to pull stories from a few as well. If I’m lucky, I’ll find a piece that’s not already attached to a story. I hate using fan art or character pieces for my inspiration. Something about making them my own just feels wrong.

Even deviantART fails me more often than not, though and I must turn to something else. Free writing sometimes helps but it usually just leads to a bunch of rambling words that make little to no sense… you know, like most of my writing. The thing that I find helps most when I can’t think of anything to write, or when I can’t quite figure out how to proceed is vomiting plot on the nearest acquaintance and hoping the spew something back at me. It actually works pretty well. I find that when I talk about my stories or ideas to other people they usually have something good to add to it. If I happen to be talking to another writer, which is about 98.89% of the time, I might even get straight out suggestions. I probably get on my friends nerves all the time, but meh, I’m sure they understand. This is my process. Let other people think for me.