- I have nothing to say right now, even though I have the urge to say nothing, brilliantly.
- My mind’s too cluttered with work, family, and other things; I just can’t think straight when it comes to fiction.
- I don’t feel like writing at the moment, but I feel like I SHOULD feel like writing.

“Writer’s block” is convenient shorthand, so long as we don’t glorify the notion that it’s some tragic disease we writers suffer that needs a miraculous cure. Sometimes the cure is simple “apply butt to chair and start writing” discipline. The resulting text may start out dull and lifeless, but if we plod along diligently, the brain will get bored with dull and lifeless and eventually insist on spicing things up just because it’s conceded defeat and needs to entertain itself. (I think. I guess it depends on how stubborn we are with ourselves, but it seems to me that “block” is a sort of mental temper tantrum against doing what we feel we “ought” to do.)

One of my favorite cures for these states is to sneak up on it and direct attention away from it - to pretend, “Okay, I’m not going to write now.” I grab my camera and indulge in a little visual creativity, or to play with Paint Shop Pro and turn my photos into “art.” I’m no photographer or artist - I actually do make my living writing. Which is part of the problem; I’m always skating on the thin edge of burn-out. Enough is enough, sometimes - even “fun” writing looks like a chore. But other art forms (including creating scrapbooks and “altered” art) give me creative outlets and remove some of that stressful “Oh, God, I think I’ve lost it!” thinking. And then, I can get back to writing, without feeling “creatively constipated.”

Another thing that helps is to write TO someone, even if it’s “the anonymous readers of my blog.” For some reason, writing in a vacuum, to nobody but me, feels silly. (Mental masturbation, anyone?) Oddly enough, that’s when the inner critic rears her ugly head. Writing TO someone feels as natural as writing an email, and doesn’t get all caught up in formality and sentence structure and the notion of “perfect” prose. It just has to communicate - to get the idea from my brain to your brain.