The 3 magic tricks that helped me break writer’s block
I discovered a magical combination of writing tricks that have changed everything. Well … changed my writing life. And sometimes that feels like everything. While all of these tips are clearly aimed at writers, and at breaking that thing we call writer’s block, the same principles can be applied to almost any craft.
Dear Norman
There is a pause that takes us into the heart of any truly beautiful thing: the swell. When something touches us, makes us stop, makes us live in that moment a little longer and a little more deeply so that we can know it, makes us think about life and perhaps also death and in so doing makes life actually feel like a precious thing, makes us know gratitude and weightlessness. We only know that feeling in rare, lucky pockets. Norman knows it here. And he invites us in. In 11 words. My god, that is everything.
The voices
A letter isn’t a book. A letter is simple. A letter is something you can write throughout the week or in one great, long breath. And if a few people expected it at a certain time on a certain day—well, that I could do. And I have loved it.
Grab her
The first time a boy pinched my ass I was in the fifth grade. His name was Spencer. He probably did it on a dare. I slapped him across the cheek as hard as a 10-year-old girl can slap. I stomped away, red-faced, to find a corner where I could cry.
A place in the wild
The day we found Rokan, the sky was blue, that sort of crisp, surreal cerulean that might only exist in New Mexico and other arid, sweeping landscapes that offer nearly nothing in the airways between you and the vastness of the beyond.
Projections
I was shuffling around, hunting and weeding, when I grabbed a tuft of unwanted sprouts and yanked, and a clod of dirt came flying out with them. In the bald spot that clod left behind, I could make out what looked like a smooth, flat piece of stone. I picked at the edges and found more stone, and then more, and before long I was hacking at the backyard, trying to excavate this covert, stony path.
The mattress
It is Saturday night and I just texted Cait, tomorrow’s self-imposed deadline hot on my mind: “I don’t know what to write about.” A minute passed, and then a chirp. “Write about the mattress.” It’s not a bad idea. The mattress is a good story.
The peacocks
Cait named one of them Charlemagne, though really they are all named Charlemagne. Ask me on a different day and I’ll tell you that’s only what we call the Albino one. The other two have yet to be named, because I cannot tell them apart.
A tiny island
Today I am thinking about dirt. Really. I am thinking about the difference between dirt and soil, and how to turn one into the other, and how there is the expression “cheaper than dirt” and yet how soil is insanely expensive. Like, really expensive, you guys. Maybe this whole time we’ve gotten the meaning behind that expression wrong. “Cheaper than dirt” could refer to almost anything, because almost anything is less expensive than dirt.
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