Your writing has a symbiotic relationship with your speaking. If you’re looking for something new to write about, or if you’d otherwise like to impact your writing in a positive way, the words that you speak are a good place to look. I could write an entire blog on this subject alone. Here’s one specific example of where speaking impacts writing: withholding communication.

This past weekend, I was working with a group of people on a couple of back-to-back long days. People tend to get impatient at times when energy levels are low. I was cranky and irritable at one point, and one person really got on my nerves. I felt my chest tightening and my pulse rising. I looked the person dead in the eye and said, “You’re really pissing me off. It looks to me like you’re picking a fight with me.” This was not usual for me. My ordinary way of handling these things: cover it up with a smile, then walk away fuming. In this case, though, it felt like a weight off my chest.

I notice that even now, several days later, I feel a lightness in my fingers as I type out these words. I’ve also noticed that my writing flows freely while my mind is free from distractions and concerns. When I’m worried, preoccupied, or angry about something that happened the day before, my writing slows to a crawl. I’ve now gotten in the habit of dealing directly with the things that slow down my writing, rather than simply engaging in superficial brainstorming techniques like I used to.

The reason why I started this off by mentioning speaking is simple. When you’re withholding something, there is a specific thing you’re avoiding saying, and a specific person you’re avoiding saying it to. If you see yourself doing this, take a look at specifically what you’re withholding and why. What are you afraid of? In my case, I noticed that I’ve been avoiding telling people when they annoy me, for fear that they might get offended. These sorts of things tend to add up.

What are you avoiding saying? The next time you see yourself stopped at the keyboard, ask yourself this question.

I’ve said before that I don’t believe there is any such thing as “writer’s block.” In reality, there’s not. However, if you believe that you’re blocked, you are. It’s possible to experience and be limited by imaginary things, especially when they’re intangible. By trying to fix writer’s block, you’re simply going to make matters worse. That’s like erecting a 20-foot barbwire fence to keep out the boogeyman. Anything you do to fix a non-existent problem will simply introduce more problems and constraints to deal with. But more importantly, anything you do to fix writer’s block will cause you to relate to it as absolute and real. This can reinforce self-limiting beliefs (such as “I’m not a good writer.”)

Instead of trying to fix it, make a point of understanding what’s going on. Write down the reasons why you’re blocked. Then, think back to other times when you had similar reasons to be blocked in other areas. That’s a start, but it may not be enough. To drill down further, look back at your personal history with writer’s block. Think back to the earliest time you can think of in your life where you were trying to write something, but you thought you just couldn’t. What thoughts were going through your head at the time?

Go as far back as humanly possible, and write down as many incidents as you can think of. Hint: you’re not looking for the solution to the problem. You’re not trying to diagnose where your writers’ block started. If that’s your mentality, the exercise won’t make any difference. Instead, just look for any new insights you might get. Here’s what I usually find when I do these sorts of exercises: when I’m coming up with excuses not to write, I’m very creative and articulate!

I’ve found that the more I “batch” my writing, the more focused I become. The more focused I get, the better I write. However, I find that after a point, my writing begins to diminish as I get tired and my focus starts to diminish. Three hours seems to be about optimum.

I used to write for 20 minutes a day, in the morning. While I still do this at times, I sometimes notice that I’m just starting to get into the groove after 20 minutes. There is a period of ups and downs, and it’s usually after about 30 minutes that I really get into the zone and start cranking out the words.

The basic problem that there is to overcome, regardless of the length of time, is simple. The more I’m thinking about other things, the less focused I am on my writing. Writing amid other activity is useless. If there’s one area of life where I distinctly force myself to NOT multi-task, it’s in this area. Creativity and multitasking generally don’t go well together (at least not the way most of us multi-task).

What I find to be the overall most effective approach: deal with everything else that needs immediate attention first, or schedule a time when I’ll get it dealt with. That way, I can stop thinking about it. Once I get to this point with everything in my life, my space is clear to write. So, if I know I’m going to be writing for about 3 hours, I make sure to deal with everything that can’t wait at least three hours, and make a plan to deal with everything that can’t wait a full week. Then, for the next 3-hour period, it’s easy to rid myself of distractions. Generally, this is when I produce my highest quality writing.

I’m now in the process of building up my schedule where I do everything in 3-hour increments. I’m starting to see that once I’m doing this consistently, everything in my life will work.

I’ve found yet another gem this week that I’ve used to pull myself out of the writer’s block mud several times already. When I need a fresh perspective on a subject I’m writing about, I often compare the subject to a dissimilar thing. I’ve been using this trick for awhile now, and this week, I discovered a new twist on the idea. Confession: this isn’t my idea. I stole it. Michael Michalko wrote the idea in his book, Thinkertoys.

For example, six months ago I was writing an article about brainstorming, and I asked myself, “What does brainstorming have in common with a blender?” (I scanned the room for objects to use for the exercise, and my eyes fell on a blender first.)

Here’s what I came up with at the time: a blender needs to be rinsed after every use, a blender combines different ingredients into a seemingly-homogenous end product, a blender’s blades dull over time, and a blender whips air bubbles into the thing it’s blending at high speeds, causing the volume of the blended substance to appear larger than it is. What does that have to do with brainstorming?

Brainstorming requires starting fresh each time you do it. If you start the brainstorming process with other things on your mind, that’s like using a blender with residue still in it; you’ll taste the last thing you blended in the thing you’re blending now. In similar fashion, brainstorming with yesterday’s ideas on your mind will produce a re-hashed version of the same ideas you came up with yesterday. Brainstorming involves combining different ideas. So on and so forth.

This week, I decided to expand on the idea with the book I’m writing. I decided to compare my marketing paradigm to the Pied Piper of Hamelin and see what new ideas I come up with that way. Note: the concept is already modeled after the Pied Piper; I made that decision weeks ago. But this time, I decided to re-read the original Pied Piper fable and see what it has in common with marketing.

Here’s what I got right off the bat: the Pied Piper was anonymous, but his skills made him instantly famous in a town who’d never heard of him. He solved an immediate, pressing problem that the townspeople needed to deal with (the rat infestation). He wasn’t a good deal closer, since he didn’t manage to collect payment for his services. He seduced people into following him.

The next time you get stuck, try cracking open a fairy tale and asking yourself what the main character would do in a situation like yours.

This has become one of my “commandments” as a writer. Not that I particularly believe in playing by the rules, but if I did, I think this would be one of them. I’ve noticed that one of the quickest things that gets me stuck in writers’ block is the notion that I have to continue doing things the way I was doing them before.

The problem boils down to this: an idea will never inspire you more than it does in the moment you conceive it. It occurs for me that when I think up a new idea, I have to stay on it. As soon as I let the inspiration cool off, the momentum dies down and the idea doesn’t sound as good the next day. I’ll find myself struggling to think of more to write on a given subject, when only days before, I couldn’t stop the ideas from flowing. This isn’t necessarily a problem in itself; the problem happens when we keep trying to teach a dead dog new tricks. The solution is to move on to a new dog. Hence, a blank sheet of paper and a new seedling idea each day.

I’ve applied this approach to the book I’m currently writing; I found that the outline I originally came up with constricted the flow of my ideas. So, every day, I start a new manuscript, as if I were going to throw away the old one. I find that this gives me a new freedom, and every day I get new insights into the book. Once I have plenty of material written, all there is to do is cut and paste. This has greatly improved my writing efficiency; when I was trying to fill out sections of an old outline, I was trying to write about stale ideas that no longer inspired me and I’d get stuck.

So, if you’re finding yourself in writer’s block, trying starting over.