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.
Meteorites, giraffes, astronauts, and other favorites
A curated list of some of my favorite (and most anxiety-reducing) stories. I hope they bring a little more light into your world.
Steinbeck’s pencils
Steinbeck used pencils while they were long and slender, when they felt to him to provide the correct balance—a shape that could propel him forward, like good running shoes; a size to help him pick and prod the right forms, like chopsticks.
One scar, seven years
I used to have a scar on my left hand that reminded me of my first Thanksgiving without my mother. I wonder now if I can even call it a scar, seeing as how it’s since faded past the point of detection—then again, we all know the most unassailable wounds are often those invisible to the eye. In any case, it was there and now it’s gone. Isn’t that the entire point?
The meteorites
We imagined the day the meteor struck what was now my backyard, how the shrapnel must have blown through the air like dandelion seeds, how that day had been buried by time and dirt, only to be sifted back to the surface by a biblical flood.
“My OCD”
I don’t know how old I was the first time I had an obsessive-compulsive thought. I’m not even sure of my age in the earliest memory I have of such an event, although I’ve always assumed it was 6, the number we tend to attribute to all early childhood recollections.
The girl and the giraffe
I chose to believe the story for as long as I did because it was the kind of story children want to believe, and, if we’re being honest, the kind of story grownups tell in the first place because some part of them wants to believe it, too.
Figments in the woods
Today I thought about you. And you. And you as well. I wonder what you think about me, when your memories are likewise unpacked and hooked about your head like a series of collected ornaments, out of season and shaking loose too much glitter and dust.
Let it burn
The thing about the act of burning is it destroys only a shape, impermanent to begin with. It disassembles. Not unlike a caterpillar in a cocoon, dissolved to paste only to be remolded. Not unlike a star, flung into disparate corners of the universe to make a planet, a foot, a piece of cake—stardust, all.
Dive in
Pain is like a wave, she told me, although she almost certainly wouldn’t have used that word. “Pain” has no place in the universe that is childbirth, even though it is so often affixed to it. What is pain when it’s only currency for something miraculous? Pain as the gateway to life. Pain as mother.
Like velvet
Starting a business requires something usually reserved for religion and relationships (both of which often suffer in the throes of entrepreneurship): faith. A truckload of it. A truckload with a tendency to back over and flatten too many other things that matter.
Water in air
It is quiet now at night, even in the city, roads and voices muted by the mad hush of rain. Rain against pavement is also a sound, but it slips through ears like it does through gutters, spilling over and out and rushing to sea in the way all moments and memories eventually do. But I imagine that tonight even without the rain the world would seem silent, no matter the city or bustle or subway line. Tonight is made for our quiet.
How the wild things grow
It is a different kind of motherhood to tend a garden, one that is probably more about nurturing yourself than a tiny creature. But as we each stretch further from our childhoods, grow like saplings toward the sun, so it becomes more important, and often more necessary, that we learn to provide ourselves with some parenthood as well.
Popular stories.
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.
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