Whether you fancy yourself the second coming of William Wordsworth or share the impossibly imaginative mind of Walter Mitty, you’ve probably hit an absolute wall at some point trying to write. During these troubling times, we’ve likely chewed pencils, scrunched papers, strangled computer monitors, jammed our keyboards, punched pillows, or taken long, tireless walks by the lake questioning if writing is even meant for me.

These are the moments we seek inspiration from someone, somehow, from somewhere. Well, here’s a quick guide to help you find your oasis for inspiration.

The cause for the ‘wall’

First things come first. You must dissect the reason why you’re having this writing crash. Is it burnout? Is it stress? Has your reservoir of ideas run dry? Simply unmotivated? Are you insecure about your writing? (see my “Writing Insecurities” post) Are you second-guessing your talent? Is it something else entirely? Whatever the reason may be, isolate what it is that’s blocking you from writing to bring you a step closer to the answer. This will require a lot of self-examination and self-interrogation – if you can muster it!

Read more books

Read, read, and then read some more. Sounds simple, because it is. If you are a writer seeking inspiration, the first thing I’ll always say is to read more. Read all kinds of literature from all kinds of authors, old and new. Every writer just has that ‘style’ that’s so idiosyncratic you start to search inwardly for your own vocabulary. How do you speak? How do you describe? How do you write? If you want to find the words, you look within.

Even rereading your favorite works often strum up the curious love we have for literature. Rereading that old-timey classic that first piqued your curiosity, or that saucy contemporary that set off the light bulb in your brain of what the writers of today are capable of.

Whatever it may be, pick up that comfort book of yours and give a few chapters a read, and before you know, you’re already following in their lead.

Not only will reading more put more types of ideas in your mind for what to write next, but it will relax enough to where the internal frenzy of thoughts of how much “I need to write! I need to write! I need to write!” will subside.

Not to mention, seeing another author’s accomplishments, convictions, ideas, and passion for their work can in it of itself be a guiding motivation for us. This author probably hit a wall too, but the need to tell their story to the world got to them to their finished product. So, if it can happen for them, it can for me. 

Reread your own works

Sometimes the ‘wall’ will come when the love you once had for your prose has lost its luster, and this can be the most challenging obstacle a writer has ever faced. When this happens for me, I always become my own biggest fan, rereading my stories and my work from the beginning, pretending I had never heard of these characters, known these places, or expected what happens next. I place myself into the lens of the reader, the “Looking-Glass Self” if you will, a little nugget for the Communication Studies nerds in this blog. 

Fall in love with your characters. Take another look at the world you created, the chapters you’ve written so far, the amount of work and creativity it took to make something no one else has ever made, and let that give you a sense of accomplishment, as well as a sense of urgency to not let all of that go to waste over one single lapse in creativity.

The same way that the usual secret ingredient for ‘lost love’ in relationships is often to ‘go back to the beginning when the love first appeared’, where your story originated and the very blots of ink on the paper is now your new ‘Fountain of Youth/Elixir of Life/City of Gold’ when it comes to finding your source of inspiration. Those thoughts that raced in your head when the story was first born are now your proverbial guiding North Star. 

Besides, when the work is finished, you will have to reread – well, proofread – your work anyway before it’s submitted to an editor, colleague, agent, or publisher. So, you might as well start now at Chapter 1 and try and jog the memory of the ‘why’ and ‘how’ your story was told. It doesn’t even have to be the Chapter 1 of the story you are on now, if you have written multiple works published or unpublished, that same sense of pride and creativity still exists in those as well.

Music is for the muse

Sometimes a writer’s block stems from lack of creativity, and fewer things strike the creative genius more than music does. Music unlocks imagination, so when you hear the lyricism of anyone from Hozier to Kanye West, try to imagine a scene in your mind.

What are the characters doing? What are they saying? What’s the dramatic nature of their story? Why is the singer or songwriter so passionate?

This becomes easier if the song is a ballad or if you are listening to an album that centers around a specific story or if you know the real-life story that inspired it. 

Frank Ocean’s Blond evoking such intensely emotional tracks with enigmatic sadness, the healing melancholy of Phoebe Bridgers’ beautifully tragic Punisher, Green Day’s ever-rebellious, ever-reflective, and ever-political American Idiot, Kesha’s awakened, all-too remedial “Praying”, Sasha Sloan’s maturing nostalgia yet immensely bittersweet vibes from “Older”, Ne-Yo’s heartbreak, sorrow, and lamentation in “Mad”, or the historical significance and altruistic fulfillment in U2’s “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” are all pieces of music that come to my mind immediately. 

For you, it could be totally different tracks across totally different genres, but as the core of what you feel from that level of storytelling is there, the emotion, and with it, inspiration, will come.

Take a hiatus

Sometimes, the wall wins. Mark Twain had to stop writing Huckleberry Finn five times before finally finishing the work and publishing it to the world. Taking a break from the work will sometimes let you come back to it with fresher eyes and a new stories and experiences to bring to the world you create (if it’s fiction), or if it’s nonfiction, there’s still always a new angle to look at things, and sometimes giving the mind a break is the best way to bring that new perspective forward.

This hiatus could be weeks, months, years, it’s really up to the author and the wall. Consult with your wall, ask it how many years it’s been building up and how many years it will take to tear down. Just know, you will have time. There is always that anxious urgencies in us to churn out story after story to maintain our ‘relevancy’, but that has always felt like such a flimsy idea to me, so you should write, take a break, write, take a break, and finish the story on your terms. The writing process is not a linear process. You will have setbacks, pitfalls, and obstacles, and a hiatus will not undermine any of the work you have done. Even an unfinished work can still be a masterpiece. (See Lord Byron’s Don Juan, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Geoffery Chauncer’s Canterbury Tales, Edgar Allan Poe’s Light-House, Kentaro Miura’s Berserk).

Write it backwards

I don’t mean write it like “doG saw drow eht dna drow eht saw gninnigeb eht nI”, but actually to write the story out of order. Sometimes this writing slump of ours comes from the part of the story we find the least interesting, and thus lack the words or phrases or overall knowledge to write this part. If you begin to write the scenes or parts that precede it and follow it, writing what’s in between then becomes a matter of bridging those two together rather having to sludge your way through a tedious, boring, or apathetic part of your story.

Like I said, the writing process is not always linear, so feel free to move on to a different part of the book to where you have a better understanding of what you want to write, then fill in the dots later on. I did this all the time when I hit the wall writing essays in college, and while it may not have always worked for the best grade, it always worked for the deadline. I am not sure if that is promising or not.

These are my best tips. There is a litany of other tips, tricks, blogs (Reedsy has a blog for everything), and even entire books! that covers this, so if you read this far, I hope at least one of these suggestions helped clear the mist for your writing.