Everyone has most likely felt the excruciating feeling of annoyance when he/she sits down, pen in hand, paper on desk, but ideas not in their brain. It can be quite irritating, especially if it’s for a school paper that’s due soon, but good intuitions may not come automatically. Sometimes people think too hard and the easy solutions fail to come to them, while other times the mind just fails to be stimulated. If that’s the case, here are some tips to help get the gears in your head moving.

Read. That’s the best of the advice I have to give. If you can’t think of anything, a common thing to do is to look through an example and try to base your ideas off that. Such is the case with reading – you can peruse other peoples’ works and try to scrounge some ideas from them. I’m not saying to take everything verbatim as that’s plagiarism (and results of that are nasty as we’ve all heard), but you can pull some basic themes from it. There are many times that I’ve broken writer’s block by simply pulling out a book and reading through a few pages when something suddenly hits me. If you don’t like reading, well then that’s your loss.

Listen to music. No, I’m not talking about rock or screamo or rap or any of those music genres that blow out everyone’s ears, listen to something from the classic composers (yes, lyric-less music does exist!). I find it easiest to write while listening to impressionistic music from composers such as Liszt, Debussy, or Ravel, as their pieces make you feel a multitude of emotions and harmonies. Other times if I want to write something fierce I’ll listen to some late Beethoven or Scriabin. Listening to music has been proven to help out the creative side of the brain, so this is another great way to get past the oh-so-feared writer’s block.

Do some quick-writes. Quick-writes are what I call a short writing piece about a set topic in which I just write as much as I can about anything that has some relevance to that topic. For example, a usual quick-write I do is taking any inanimate, dull object (such as a brick) and then proceed to describe it in as much detail as possible so that I can fill up a page about it. This gets you to broaden your mind and think outside the box because if you have too shallow a road of thought you won’t get too far down the page. Other times I write short fanfictions, which are stories about a story. Sometimes people may find it easier to write about something that already has a plot and characters laid out. I call it “playing in the sandbox,” because you already have the sand (the original story) and you’re just remodeling it to something you like. While writing fanfiction you may find that something you incorporate into it, such as a plot twist, character development, etc, is something you like, and then you can then use for your own piece as well.

Another thing you can do is to just write. Think of something (it can be the most random thing ever), put the pen on the paper, and scribble away. Sometimes you may find that from that one random idea you can branch off more than you thought. Even if you don’t think it makes sense, just keep writing until you’ve extracted everything possible from your head. Editing always comes later; getting your thoughts down comes first. Personally, I believe that all the outlining and pre-writing diagrams with circles all over the place are a waste of time. It’s like a little cage to me because I feel that I’m restricted to writing only about what I put in the outline, which leads to me spending too much time pondering over one topic. Instead, just writing helps much more as the boundaries are loosened and you can be creative. If you know what you have to write about, then just start writing. Ideas will most likely come to you as you’re scrawling away. If you’re the kind of person who likes to plan things out and follow a structured system, then that’s fine as well. Not everyone’s the same.

If after doing all these things still nothing comes to your head, then just stop and take your mind off writing. Do something else which will get you to not think about writing and then come back to it later. Who knows, something might come to you out of the blue. And well, if you’re not a writer or a reader, you’ll have to be one during English class, so it would be best to hone your skills now and learn to fight off possible writer’s block. Hopefully this article helped!