Writer’s block? Gaaah, have a punt on the page. Take off without a map, see what you find. Here are some tips for when my mind’s a real mess and I reckon I’ll suck it and see.
1. Mess around with prompts. Grab anything that gets your mind buzzing and drop into the scene—ask yourself: why are you there?
“There’s no Wi-Fi…”
“The waiting room is full of ads…”
“I hear the saxophones in the storeroom, their epiphanies and sighs…”
“Soap bubble dreams blow from their young mouths…”
Pick the prompt that speaks loudest and let the story tell itself.
2. Scrap every now. Whip out your smartphone or a notebook or a piece of paper and jot it down—the word, the phrase… that thing catching in your mind. Stories are everywhere, in the margins of the everyday. Take fragments clean out of context. Snatch what you hear on a train ride home or to work, in a coffee queue before your turn, on a neon sign… and run with it.
I said, “Hello.”
He looked at me, eyes beautiful and sad, and he said, “Furrows and grooves.”
Ripping something out of context can help craft new fiction that makes sense of the strangest words. Cut a line loose from its real-world anchor, create an enigmatic void.
3. Find the surreal in the ordinary. Train your eyes to notice the oddity in the mundane. Look for people or things slightly out of place, abandoned, or imbued with quiet history. Like a rusted red bicycle chained to a tree outside a children’s daycare centre. Why is it there? Who rode it? Who left it? Why has no one cut the lock? Ask what if…
…it belonged to a teacher who did a runner mid-semester?
…the bike hasn’t aged, but the gum tree grew around it overnight?
…returning to claim it busts decades of a family curse?
4. Tap into a current affair. Life is a sketch show when it’s not a shit show, and the news can provide a real mystery. How does a family of three end up in the ocean? How did they get to a clifftop car park at 3am? Why did they find just the bodies of the mother and a toddler shoring up, a six-year-old still missing?
Real life provides high-stakes drama every single day—from leadership challenges, royal commissions, burglaries, murders, extreme weather events to citywide blackouts. Grab a headline from the news and zoom into a human moment that reconstructs what happened.
5. Journal as alchemy. Mine your inner landscape and chart your thoughts and feelings before they slip away. Your subconscious is constantly processing fears, desires, loves and hates. Take a dream, an anxiety, a sensuous memory… and chuck it into a tale.
Might be a game changer.
6. Use language as play. Break a few grammar rules and lean into the lilt of your roots. Mess around with the architecture of a sentence. Turn nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns: Let a character autumn their way across a room, or speak in whispers of glass. Honor ancestral voice: How would your grandmother say it? Borrow from the rich and poetic logic of your cultural or other heritage to ‘write different’.
7. Create in collaboration. Writing is a solo gig, but try getting wrapped in a mateship—might surprise you. Writing with others can be a unique way of finding synergy in a mob. Two, three… minds may, literally, be better than one.
A creative collaboration is like a marriage: it needs trust, respect and a shared artistic frequency. Find a partner who complements you.
8. Tap into memory. Your lived experience is a sensory archaeology. Use authentic detail to create poignant fiction. You don’t need to write autobiography to use your life—simply exhume the artefacts of your past. Dig into sensory memory for an anchors
The smell of rain on your grandmother’s coat.
The pull of a black river you caught a fish from as a child.
The cackle and whistle of a leaf out of sight that day you got lost.
The weather-worn groove on the bark of a mopane tree right outside your home.
The aroma of durian in your neighbour’s plot.
Give it a crack. The emotional truth of your experience might make the fiction real to you, and the reader.
And when all else fails, your mind in a tougher mess, the heck are you going on about? Give it a rest. Get stuck into a book by your favourite author. Watch the footy. Kick back with a flick you bloody adore.
A story will come when it’s ready.
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She is a Solstice, British Fantasy, Ignyte, Locus, Foreword Indies and BSFA Award winner. She’s also a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick Awards and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was announced on the honor list for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
This essay is part of Eugen Bacon’s blog tour for the novel Crimson in Quietus. Publisher Meerkat Press is also holding a giveaway for a gift card as part of the tour.