Oh Dear My Muse Has Left Me

It’s something that all writers have to face sooner or later, that day when they wake up and try to write an article, but no topic comes to them, and the words refuse to flow.  It’s called Writers Block, or in other words My Muse Has Left Me.

It’s on days like this you realize that your muse has taken a break, and if you are like me and have tried to force an article out of yourself, it almost always doesn’t work, especially if it’s a topic that requires research and your mind keeps wandering.

There are several solutions to this, and ideally the option to take is to just break from forcing yourself to write for anything from a few hours to a few days.  Get out and have some fresh air, play a video game, watch a movie, spend time with the kids, but don’t try and force an article or chapter of a book, it’s just not worth it.

Unfortunately, life is not always that simple, and you might be faced with trying to write one or more articles on that day, to meet a quota or a personal goal.

In that case, my solution is usually to take what I call the “Seinfeld Approach“, which is named after the popular sitcom that was written about absolutely nothing.

To apply the Seinfeld Approach, just begin writing an article, like I have done here, since my muse failed to come up with a topic for an article that was related to the letter “O” (Oh Dear).

You will soon find that if you begin to write about how you don’t know what to write about, and that you really ought to be writing about this or that or the other topic, that before you know it you have a full blown article that actually talks about having nothing to write about.

Sometimes my inner poet picks up on this and sends me a rhyme, which I publish and then all the other writers that I know comment back and say that they understand and have exactly the same problems.  Well it’s good to know that you are not alone, and that you have friends.

A good example of this is my 101st article on Yahoo Contributor Network entitled Brain Dead Again which is a poem that begins like this:

I want to write a poem
It will be Article 101
I just published the 100th
But another just won’t come

I’ve tried to think of this and that
Of words that fit and rhyme
But all the time my brain just spins
And I’m running out of time

It’s quite a fun poem if you have time to read the full article.

Of course if you write about nothing and nobody reads it or comments on it, maybe it’s time to switch careers…

Another thing that you can do, is to do like I did one day last year when I was struggling to write something.  I wrote an article entitled What Shall I Write About Today, which commented on the articles that I had been writing about in the previous few days, and what I really would like to be writing about, but it really was about nothing.

So what is your muse doing today?  Are you managing to write anything, or are you stuck in a rut (good name for an “I don’t know what to write about story”) like I was.

I don’t know about you, but I just started writing about nothing and now I have today’s article completed.