5 Ways To Battle Any Producer’s Worst Nightmare: “WRITER’S BLOCK”
“Writers Block is my biggest enemy” is kind of a statement that comes out from every person in the creative field at some point of their career.
In its simplest terms, writer's block is when you’re inspired for days and are constantly banging out new stuff or completing old stuff but suddenly you get this weird feeling like you’re going nowhere with the project and no matter how hard you try. You just can’t write or do something that pleases your vision or maybe doesn’t really goes with what you’re trying to achieve. Writer’s block is nothing but a state of mind and no creative person should waste their time thinking “Yeah, It’ll go away in a day or two, till then I’ll just play video games”.
Here are some points that have helped me and some of my friends in music to get out of this state that doesn’t let you make anything new.
1. Sometimes Our Subconscious Is Holding Us Back:
In this creative industry, no one knows the future. You don’t know when something good will finally happen and even though you might be going through some really hard stuff and things won’t be working out in spite of you putting in the work, all these bad thoughts keeps on accumulating in your subconscious mind. So making something or being immensely creative during this time sure is a challenge. But there is this concept of Stoicism that you can study briefly which in short means “endurance of pain without it actually affecting you”. This concept will help you reflect on your current situation and might help bring your creativity back from the dead.
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2. Try To Make Something You Usually Won’t Make:
This is something that has been discussed about a lot in the past. Making something that you’re not fond of, or something you won’t put out might seem like a waste of time at first but doing this possibly holds the key to opening creative doors that might help you in adding that extra 1% in your projects that you’re working on. The bottom line is to try making something totally different that you know might help you out in the stuff you like to make.
3. Way Too Much Is Going On In Your Head:
This point goes perfectly with the first point. One of the major reason that your creative flow is blocked, is that maybe just way too much is going on in your head regarding various things. These are either the things that scare you about your career or things that you shouldn’t be thinking about, which is ultimately avoiding you from concentrating and being in the moment. In addition, other reason that you’re not able to write anything fruitful is that maybe you’re trying to fit in way too much stuff in a single project which is making you lose your path and ultimately confusing you.
4. You Have Set The Bar Too High:
If you introspect, you’d agree that there have been multiple times where you set the bar so high, and if you failed to achieve 100%, it made you feel miserable. The thing is if you start a project with some kind of a bar set / expectation, you’d most probably end up failing because you’re no robot and creativity comes from experimenting. So, the best thing would be to start a project with open mind and experiment with different things but still have some vision as to what you want to achieve and then write freely. Doing so would actually make you happy and you’ll be more than satisfied with the result you get after the session.
5. Keep Your Distractions Away:
This is so obvious but so effective. Your phone and social media is your creativity’s biggest enemy. The best advice if you really can’t stay without checking social media would be to surf all you want, check out each of your socials, reply to as much messages/e-mails that you can, watch latest videos and check out some dank memes, but in a limited time frame. Do all of the above for say 45 minutes and give 15 minutes to get yourself in the zone then put your DAW in full screen, turn off your computer's Wi-Fi, keep your phone and tablet in another room and just get to work for as long as you want to. After you’re done with your session, you’ll be amazed to see how much stuff you were able to do.
After reading this if you still feel like giving up that day where creative juices are running low and you’re like, “nah i'll just do it tomorrow and today I'll open a cold one with the boys”, refrain yourself from doing so and force yourself to write something. Maybe writing a new drum pattern, making new sounds, new loops or anything, as something or the other for sure will go with your vision and defeat the writers block. Remember that "going hard on yourself will avoid the good ideas to come out that were already there”.
