Education & Opportunity

In my newspaper column for Jan.18, I discuss an affliction that virtually every student has had from time to time... good ol' fashioned writer's block. Over the years as a student, author, and columnist, I've spent a lot of time figuring out a good system for getting "un-stuck" when you feel like your creative energy is sapped.

I hope the strategies I mentioned in the article--perform a free write, talk it over, and "zoom in"--can be of some use to you.  One philosophy underlying all of these techniques is that you can, in fact, spur creativity through improvisation. Consider for a moment a great jazz musician: The musician's greatest melodies may not come from deliberate planning, but rather from freeing the mind to create truly in the moment. The same could be said for a great off-the-cuff public speaker. Or even a freestyle rapper.

Neurologists, in fact, tell us that improvisation may be a strategy for engaging other parts of the brain that would otherwise lay dormant. The technique of "free writing," therefore, can be thought of as a way to help you make the writing process more improvisational.  The hope is that instead of writer's block lasting for many hours or days, it can be resolved in a matter of minutes.

In this way, perhaps the writer's block is merely telling us that, at this specific moment, we need to engage our innate creativity in a different way. If you have a menu of options to choose from like the ones I mentioned in the column, it's more than likely that at least one of strategies will be exactly what you need to recharge and replenish your creative impulses.