It's been a very tough week (as per usual these past few weeks) and I've been sitting here staring at the blank screen of my computer trying to think of a topic to write about for the newspost.

And I got nothing. I keep drawing blanks. I have some fleeting ideas about stuff I could write about, but nothing that is formed enough to be put in words, let alone a concise and useful little essay so that you don't mourn the 3-4 minutes from your life you spent reading what I wrote. (Yes I hate wasting anyone's time including mine!)

So I had no choice but to write about exactly this: drawing a blank. Experiencing writer's block. Or even creativity block when even drawing your most frequently drawn character is not working like it should.

Why does such a block happen and what can you do to make it go away?

In my experience, writer's block happens on two occasions: either the brain is just too tired and/or overwhelmed or there's an issue that needs to be sorted out before creativity can flow again.

The brain is too tired and/or overwhelmed

This can be simply straight up exhaustion of some sort (mental or physical or both). It could be related to the creative work or it could be completely unrelated to it. The bottom line is that as human beings we have a vast yet finite amount of physical and mental energy to invest in activities. Once it's expended, we just have to rest until it is replenished in order to continue.

Rest means to allow your brain to rest. Often this means to let go of stress, or find ways to lower anxiety. Easier said than done perhaps, but there are methods to manage it. It gets easier with practice. Other times it just means you should straight up go to sleep for a solid 8 hours or 12. We have REM sleep and deep sleep exactly for this purpose.

Rest also means physical rest. If your body is too tired then it's too much work for your brain to push it to function so you can do your thing, and you get the same result as mental overwhelm. Same goes when you are ill. Illness doesn't work the same way for everyone or even the same way between illnesses but it's a given that if all your resources are going to battle off the germ there will be little energy left for creativity.

So take a break. The sooner you take the break the sooner you can go back to creating.

Something needs to be hashed out/resolved

Sometimes your brain will refuse to produce work if there's something wrong with the work itself. A character's design may not be right, or the worldbuilding might just not work well, or the plot is not arranged in a way that works or helps you, as the creator, get immersed and create within it.

The frustrating thing about this situation is that is may not always be obvious that the problem is in the work itself, that something isn't quite the way it should be. It might be perfect on the drawing board, but just won't take off on the page when you write or draw. And yet no matter how much you push the story or the worldbuilding or even the composition on a webcomic page, it just doesn't come together.

If after taking a good rest the writer's/creator's block remains, changing up some elements of what you're working on may be what you need to get the flow going again. Maybe your main character should be poor instead of a rich kid, and suddenly everything snaps into place and your fingers fly over the keyboard. Or perhaps instead of having magic be innate it can be taught to the ones that are dedicated enough and bam! The world now has rules that make sense and you can get the plot going! What if instead of trying to figure out panel shapes on a page, you get rid of panels altogether, and let the art bleed into each frame?

Don't just make small changes. Make huge, garish changes that may be completely terrible and silly, but will help serve as great contrast to see your own work from a different angle and perhaps stumble into what needs to be solved in order for your brain to lift the writer's block.

How do you handle writer's block?



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