Category Archives: Unblocking Exercises

Writing Stuck?

Try This

By Annette Rey

What do you have to write? What small message (or large) do you think you have to offer? I know. You don’t think you have such a monumental thing to donate. Most of us believe we live mundane lives and underestimate what we can pass to others. But readers are interested in your life experiences.

What of your childhood? Go back. Somewhere you learned an important lesson, you found compassion seeing a crippled child, you heard your father yell an epithet and it chilled you, a birthday party went awry…

Continue reading →

Improv Writing

How It Works

By Annette Rey

There are many techniques a writer can use to get himself going, to break the block. I have experimented with improvisational writing and find it to be very effective in getting my mind racing forward and my fingers flying on the keyboard.

This is an easy and casual exercise to perfect.

Continue reading →

A Writer’s Calling Card

It’s Not What You Think

By Annette Rey

As writers, we are always looking for inspiration for a new slant on old ideas, for freshness inside ourselves. It’s fine to write gloom and thunder and broken hearts but I think all writers need UP messages and a cheerful attitude to draw them in, to begin their journey into expressing their voice on the printed page.

So we need a calling card, something that calls US into the act of writing. Let’s look at UP calls and see where that brings us.

Continue reading →

Conduct First-Hand Research for Writing Inspiration

Places to Experience and Enjoy

By Annette Rey

My last post suggested you break the monotony in your life and get out of your house to collect new experiences and material about which to write. You can take this new knowledge and adapt it to a fiction piece, poetry, haiku, or create an article about the experience that you may query a magazine to publish.

I promised in my next post to list opportunities, many of them free, that may also be available in your area. You will be surprised at the variety of offerings that can get your writing juices flowing.

Here is the info.

Continue reading →

Challenge to Writers: Jump Into a Blissful Research Break

Boy, Have I Been Having Fun!

By Annette Rey

Any time away from your daily grind job is fun, right? Well, I have been recently blessed with a relief in my workload. I am spending that time enrolling in free, educational, one-day events around town (at colleges, nature centers, libraries, and churches)*.

These are marvelous opportunities for writers. Waves of new information enter your head and the creativity part of your brain lights up. I will be sharing these experiences with you, encouraging you to search out the same types of opportunities in your part of the world. You will be amazed at what is out there to stoke your writer’s imagination to help you break through anything you may think is writer’s block.

Take a look.

Continue reading →

What Person Has Most Influenced Your Life?

For the Good or for the Bad

By Annette Rey

Here is a dynamic exercise for you to investigate your own life, like examining the growth rings of a tree. Delve deeply into your psyche and your memory and answer the following fifteen questions. You will discover new things about yourself, a significant person that has profoundly affected you, and your past. This may take some courage to complete. Do you dare?

Continue reading →

Picture Prompts for Writers

By Annette Rey

Here are some visuals to inspire a short story, a poem, a flash fiction. Be creative. Dream. Write.

 100_5977

Do you know where you are?

Are you driving alone?

Is someone you don’t know driving the car?

 

Sunny, but sinister? Are your spider senses tingling?

005

What goes on inside? Does a cult meet here? Is a psychopath holding hostages and no one on the outside knows it yet?

What is this man pointing to? What is in his pouch?

021

Are you filled with sympathy? What thoughts do you have about how vulnerable he is on the city streets? Could he be your new protagonist?

IMG_1898

 

Trapped!

You are locked inside a store with an angry bear!

How do you outsmart him…or not?

 

100_1312

Is this a story about the past? What did this tree witness? What role did it play in the lives of many? Who is mourning its passing? Who was the violent agent who brought down such a monument to life?

Write the stories you feel and see in these images.

Just write!

The world is waiting to hear your song.

 

Baseballs, Beach Balls, and Sex

Look, Think, Write

By Annette Rey

Writer’s block? Okay, we’ve been over this before.

Step One: Look around your room.
Step Two: What do you see?
Step Three: Name it out loud.
Step Four: What thoughts are conjured by those words?
Step Five: Write about it.

It really is that simple.

Why? Because you are a creative writer, that’s why. Believe in yourself.

Continue reading →

You Can’t Get Anywhere Without a Plan

Break That Block!

By Annette Rey

Writers’ block bothering you? Stop the excuses. Stop the helter-skelter approach you may have to your writing.

It is key to HAVE A PLAN.

Continue reading →

Spiders, Crawlers, and Bots, Oh My!

Write These Into Your Work

By Annette Rey

We live in an exciting day – so much fodder out there to add to our writing pieces. We are only limited by our imaginations.

Continue reading →