I hate to admit this, but I’m not a particularly fast typist. People tend to give me credit for being one, just because of the quantity of writing I can output in a short period of time. But here’s a little-known secret: typing skill and speed have nothing to do with writing throughput.

I typed my senior high school research paper on a mechanical typewriter. Most people would probably assume that I’m too young to even remember that such a thing ever existed. I remember how you couldn’t strike two keys too close together, and that if you did, the hammers would smack into each other and you’ve have to unstick them. I remember having to push extra hard on the “backspace button,” and sometimes having trouble fitting my pencil eraser into the little window where the letters were. I remember how my papers always had smudge marks all over them, and how easy it was to tell how much of a hurry I’d been in to finish an assignment the night before it was due.

I eventually graduated to a laptop after moving past the daisy-wheel printer days, and I have to say that I never get over what a relief it is that I only have to type any given thing once. If I had to compete with heavy-hitting old school writers from the pre-computer era, I’d be dead meat.

How can I say that typing skills don’t matter? I won’t say they don’t matter at all; I did take a basic typing class, and I do know the home positions on the keyboard. I do know how to type without looking at my fingers. That much is important, but that part’s easy and doesn’t take more than a month to learn with consistent practice. This isn’t like playing a musical instrument; your mistakes are invisible and inaudible. A misstep is easy to hide.

The key to being a fast writer: write what you don’t know. If that doesn’t make sense, there’s no explanation I can give that will make any more sense. Just try it out. I didn’t know how I was going to write this article, for instance. I just knew that I am a fast writer despite my poor typing skills, and I didn’t particularly know why.  I knew that this would be a fun concept to explore, so I hammered out a blog title and got started.

You’ll notice, above, that I gave you a couple of stories to drive home the point about my lack of typing skills. The reason I did this: to get the usual suspects, or ordinary ideas, out of the way. That is a key component of any brainstorming process. As I wrote that brief story (which you just read), I realized that no skill really matters. It’s not about skills at all. How did I come to that conclusion? I don’t know. It just popped into my head as I wrote.

So, in case you’re waiting for me to tell you how this works, I can’t. Sorry to disappoint you. All I can do is give you an alternate point of view to consider, and a story to show how it looked for me. I can’t tell you how it’s going to work for you. The process is intuitive, and it’s not a formula. That’s why skills don’t matter. Skills come in handy when you’re copying someone else’s formula. Since we’re not dealing with a formula here, the only thing you need is ignorance. The less you know, the better this will work.

Does that make sense? If so, you’re not getting it.

It’s not a hard thing to do, really. Getting into the flow used to take me half an hour, or sometimes over an hour. It used to frustrate me when I had to stop after “getting on a roll.” In my view, it had taken me enormous effort to get into the zone, and then I had to  go do something else. But my assumption was wrong. I’d just spent the majority of my time unwilling to open my mind, only opening it just at the last second. It was almost on purpose. I really wanted to be right about the fact that I didn’t have time to do the writing I wanted to do.

But that’s just my story. What’s yours? What do you tell yourself about why you can’t write? I don’t know, and I won’t attempt to explore it here, but consider that any time the creative juices won’t flow, consider that you don’t really want them to.

I had to confront this when my schedule started to fill up with meetings, client projects, and conference calls. The time blocks for pure, just-for-fun writing started to shrink down to tiny little nuggets. I would have five minutes here, ten minutes there, or even two minutes here and there. I had told myself before that I couldn’t do any writing in less than twenty minutes. When the luxury of twenty-minute uninterrupted time blocks all but disappeared, I asked myself to consider that getting into the zone doesn’t take any time at all. Actually, as it turned out, my relationship to time was the problem.

Confession: I just wrote this in about four minutes, and I don’t have time to write any more. To be continued.

Of course, no one ever really runs out of things to say, but sometimes it seems like we do, particularly if you’re writing on a given subject. Writers tend to fall into this trap when it comes time to meet tight deadlines. Nothing kills off creativity like pressure. Bloggers sometimes fall prey to the same thing when they haven’t posted to their blogs in awhile. When this happens, we usually start to see stale themes repeating, or un-original rehashings of things we’ve already heard before. Have you ever read an author’s book and found yourself thoroughly disappointed, thinking, “What happened?” Have you ever thought that an author had lost their touch?Authors tend to start writing just for the sake of putting something out, when in fact, they’d be better off writing nothing.

One particular blogger I follow, who shall remain nameless, seems to have gone down this road. I never hear anything new in any of this blogger’s posts any more. It’s sad, and I’m sure it will turn around. I’m looking forward to it.

Do you see yourself in this situation? Your mind is gullible and easy to trick. That’s how you got tricked into believing you had nothing new to say. So, all you have to do is trick your mind into getting out of the way. That’s basically how any creativity works.

Try a few of these techniques if it seems like your well has run dry, and writing nothing isn’t an option.

1.  Write something, and promise yourself never to publish it. In this exercise, write about why you’re stuck, why you have nothing new to say, and why you’ve exhausted every possible avenue. Write about this in detail. Write about the areas you’ve already explored, and explain why there’s nothing more to explore in them.
2. Read the news. There’s always something new in the news. Then, write about why the news isn’t really new. Pick the latest, freshest story you can find, and write about why it isn’t really fresh. Write all the reasons why you’ve already written things like this before. Write all the reasons why even though this is a new event, you couldn’t possibly say anything new about it. Don’t publish this either.
3. Pick out one of your favorite writers, and identify something they wrote that you thought was original and inspiring. Identify a reason or two why their writing wasn’t really original, and make a case that it’s really just a re-hashing of something else. Write about that, in every detail. Write all the reasons why you couldn’t say anything new about this author’s writing. Don’t publish it.

Do this until you’re sick of it. You’ll find that building a solid case for the lack of new ideas is a difficult thing to do. You’ll probably find yourself resisting new ideas and swatting them away throughout the process of doing this exercise. In fact, that’s what you’ve been doing all along.

That’s why you thought you had nothing new to say.

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.