How to Stay Creative When Writing - If It's Off the Brain, It Keeps You Sane

I assume for the vast majority who are reading this, writing means something special to you. Well, it’ll be the saving grace when you are in a tight spot with your story. Don’t ever forget that writing is your best friend and safety when ideas are running thin. Writing down ideas when the creative moment hits may spark something for future writing you do.

Writers usually like to keep a journal in a place that is easily accessible for their tasty thoughts. Ideas come fast and leave even faster, so be ready! Keep a small journal in your purse or car, if you are an avid writer. That way, no matter where you are, if an idea bubbles to the surface, you won’t have to keep the tape rolling in your head throughout the day. You can write it down and know you caught one when it was fresh.

Ideas are intangible and fragile. There is a great deal of effort that goes into trying to remember everything you’ve ever thought was good for your writing without having something tangible to refer back to. In order to remember without having something, you’d have to go through a process in the mind called short-term memory to long-term memory. But this process is very complex, all just to keep an idea in your head. For something to be converted to long-term memory, there must be an active step to keep the information in the brain, like making a song or beat out of the information you are trying to remember or making a picture to help visualize your idea. For example, when I would study for a test in college, the only way I was to not drown in the sea of information which needed studying would be to make flash cards (which entails writing) and repeating over and over again the information until I memorized the question before even reading the answer. Rote memorization is one of many ways of transferring from short-term to long-term memory, but that’s a topic for another day.

If you couldn’t tell, transferring short-term to long-term memories takes lots of time, effort and mental capacity in an already overflowed brain (which is why you are even reading this most likely). If you are the type of person with that perfect photographic memory for thoughts, then kudos to you and hopefully you’ll walk away with something from this blog besides a waste of time! However, the majority of people’s minds don’t work that way. This is why keeping a journal to write down your ideas and creative inputs is one of the best remedies to a dumbstruck brain, so you can look back and possibly spark new ideas or help with a story you are currently working on. Keep the ideas flowing. Whether it sounds crazy, makes no sense or doesn’t even have to do with the story you are writing, ideas can be used endlessly for many different things and at any time to help you conquer your worst writer’s block moments.

Works Cited

Carpenter, Courtney. "The Top Ten Tips For Finding Motivation to Write."Writer's Digest. 09 May 2012. Web. 27 Oct. 2016.