Pick up a pen and notebook.
Seriously. And if you’re fortunate enough to live somewhere where you can go somewhere peaceful outdoors, then go out there. Leave the laptop at home.
There is something ominous about watching that laptop sputter and bleep to life, signaling it’s time to do some Serious Work. Blank pages of paper on the other hand, are wonderfully non-committal. Even to a linear writer like myself. My thoughts can be just as jumbled as the next fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants scribe, but I am absolutely incapable of writing out of order.
But for some reason, that mental block doesn’t seem to apply to thoughts on paper. Sometimes I write in bullet point form, sometimes in proper sentences . Sometimes I doodle, and sometimes I come up with great zingers. And it’s so wonderfully freeing not to have to think of a computer file name that’s both easy to remember and successfully sums up all the randomness that’s poured out of me. If I need to find something, I just flip through the notebook (and usually discover all kinds of great stuff I’d forgotten all about)
Best of all, when I write on paper I feel like a real writer and not like a college kid working on a term essay.
Try it, you might be very pleasantly surprised.
