Those who say there is no such thing as writer’s block have never faced a blank page with an equally blank mind as the complete absence of ideas suggests it’s time to give up writing altogether. At times like these, your blank document seems to be the size of Texas, your computer seems to be run by a malicious entity that is sending signals to block your creativity and your internal editor won’t stop nagging at you to just get on with it already. As Gustave Flaubert complained to a friend, "You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands, trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word."

Saying there’s no such thing as writers block is similar to a child closing their eyes and claiming because they can’t see you that you aren’t there. It doesn’t matter that you are tapping them on the shoulder while telling them you are there. They will continue to insist you are not there and in fact don’t even exist. When writer’s block prevents you from writing don’t try to fight it by insisting it’s not there or ignoring it. It will continue to tap you on the shoulder to remind you it is real and still there no matter how long you keep your eyes closed. Ignoring it will not make it go away and will likely only make it worse because the fact is, for whatever reason, you have no ideas and simply can’t write, which is generally the definition of writer’s block. Instead collect some strategies, writing prompts and exercises that work for you and keep them in a notebook or file on your computer. (If you use the latter make sure to back it up! Also go to your settings to make sure the automatic backup is on and set for as short an amount of time as possible just in case. This will at least ensure you have a backup of everything written prior to the last auto save point. Collecting a bunch of writing prompts that you have found successful for generating great ideas only to lose them all due to a computer failure is a sure way to have writer’s block move in with you for an extended period.)

The purpose of this article is to provide exercises that will hopefully shake some ideas loose and provide a place to start when writer’s block leaves you lost for words. While these ideas can be used just as exercises to limber up the creativity muscles, they can also be used to generate ideas for poems, short stories or even the plot for a novella or novel. While there are instructions for each exercise, don’t limit yourself to them. This is about creativity after all. If the exercise takes you in a different direction from the instructions as you write, go with it. So if you create a poem as part of an exercise, for example, and in the middle a few lines you just wrote generate a great idea for something else it’s fine to switch to jotting down notes or starting to create a new piece based on the new idea. You can always come back to the poem later if the desire hits you or there’s no need to if the goal of generating a new idea that inspires your writing has been achieved. There are no hard and fast rules to generating new ideas and beating writers block as everyone has different things that work for them. I have attempted to list as many different kinds of exercises as possible so you can discover what types of writing prompts are useful for you when trying to generate new ideas.