Total Writer Brain Death - Have You Experienced It?

[cyaxrex]

This might apply to designers too. However, as I’m not a designer, I don’t know.

In short, I have been staring for 3-hours at the last two paragraphs of an article about kitchen renovations and I just can’t find a way to go on. I need to write 50 more words and the nightmare is over. However, everything looks and sounds wrong and my brain simply can’t spit the words I need out.

Part of me is also cringing at the idea of scrolling to the top of the page to read over what I have got already. This is because I know that when I do, the whole thing is going to read like it was written by a dyslexic person from the 16th Century, smashing their hands bewilderedly against my laptop keyboard.

My creativity is completely failed me. It’s not like writer’s block. It’s more like some kind of catastrophic creative aneurysm.

Of course, I still have 4-hours to muddle through. But do any other writers experience this from time to time?

[misscrystal]

Take a short break. You’ll do it.

Kitchen renovations are not for the faint of heart but they can also be very rewarding when you see your beautiful new kitchen, looking even better than your original vision for it. Your beautiful new cabinets and appliances will bring joy and comfort each time you wake up and make your morning coffee.

Don’t worry if it sounds wrong; you will probably have a revision request anyway.

[pyonarts]

I don’t know about others but for me when I design something, sometimes I end my staring at the screen for a long time because I can’t come up with the right color palette. Whichever I use, nothing seems to satisfy me.

One of the think that works is stopping work at that time and to do something which have nothing to do with designing. Couple of hours refreshes my mind or several days until I feel like working on it again. Another thing I usually do is browse others work on instagram or dribble. It motivates me to keep going.

Maybe browse through pinterest for some inspiration, beautiful kitchen decorations might inspire you to write!!!

[zeus777]

I’m not a writer, but I do through major brain freeze (or my friend will call it brain f@rt)
from time to time.
I’m looking at the sentence in either English or Japanese, I KNOW what the sentence means but I just cannot come up with the translation that sounds right.
I once got stuck at this one little sentence for a full 40 minutes, I had to walk away from
the screen.

Same thing happens when I am drawing/designing stuff.

Again, after a while I realize I just need to walk away from it, do something else,
and get back to it with a fresh mind.

[cyaxrex]

I’m not a writer, but I do through major brain freeze (or my friend will call it brain f@rt)

from time to time.

I’m looking at the sentence in either English or Japanese, I KNOW what the sentence means but I just cannot come up with the translation that sounds right.

I once got stuck at this one little sentence for a full 40 minutes, I had to walk away from

the screen.

Same thing happens when I am drawing/designing stuff.

Again, after a while I realize I just need to walk away from it, do something else,

and get back to it with a fresh mind.

I once got stuck at this one little sentence for a full 40 minutes, I had to walk away from

the screen.

I took the dog for a walk and that seems to have fixed everything. And I found out that is now summer, and morning. 🙂

[topaz_muse]

Raises Hands

I’ve experienced this several times too many. Sometimes reading over what was just written may trigger an extra boost to help push through to the finale. It’s been approximately 2 years since I did anything worth writing about on my blogs and this past week I’ve been able to revamp things to get them started again.

Now that the blogs are squared away I need to figure out a way to finish this game script I’m writing for a fellow creative but have hit a dead end in the writing and the story. There’s even a story I have to get cracking at but have no idea where to start. The same goes for illustrations and designs.

The worst experience was the animation collab that I was helping with last year as my animation just wasn’t taking off. It wasn’t till I accidentally wrote over my files that I was able to get something off the ground and thus spent 4-hours cramming to get a 15 second+ animation together the manual way - that’s drawing out each frame separately without tweens. So yeah, brick walls and blocks happen.

I was able to get out of several years worth of illustration blocks by participating in monthly challenges along with Inktober. At the moment, I’m in the process of kick starting an experiment to get the creative writing juices going again by challenging myself to write an article every single day through out the month of May. Taking breaks and snacking helps too.