Blogger SOS: Overcoming Writer's Block

During these past few weeks, I've learnt that sitting and staring at a blank draft for hours is just part of being a blogger. That trying to type, but not actually being able to form sentences, is also a familiar occurrence. And, also, I'm not the only one that rants about this; especially when almost a week has passed and still no ideas or inspiration for a post can be found. A few hours later, after spending those alternating between the empty page and social media, I tend to come to the conclusion that I should - perhaps - try again the next day, accepting my defeat. Thanks, writer's block.

Definition: Writer's Block is a condition, primarily associated with writing, in which an author loses the ability to produce new work.*

When discussing blogging, this block could be described as those times when we are unable to write a new post, and the time-gap between our last update grows from a few days to a few weeks. Now that I've managed to overcome it(for now!) - after a week of no posts - I've decided to share some advice, in a new blog feature called Blogger SOS(which will be posted monthly).

Even whilst I'm typing this post, sat at my desk, I'm listening to a playlist I put together a few months ago(that includes songs that have helped me write before). Despite the fact that music doesn't always help - and I decide to mute the volume instead - there are times when listening to a certain artist can put me in the right mood to write a blog post. When I'm stressed, and there's a collection of coursework waiting to be completed, I struggle to write a post; watching the clock as the night draws on. Plugging in headphones is the perfect escape; where I'm able to concentrate on the task-at-hand for an hour, and hopefully write something. Anything. A handful of coherent paragraphs are welcome at this point. With music playing and a mug of hot chocolate, I find I can relax into writing, and finally, the page seems to start filling up. 

 

Experiencing these 'blocks' are the bane of my existence; and, normally, it takes me a few days to overcome them. Rather than pacing the room, I tend to choose some songs that represent what I'm trying to write about, the likes of Florence and the Machine when the genre is closer to thriller/horror. I was also recently introduced to the idea of searching through pictures and tags on sites such as Tumblr, as they are filled with images that could spark something. If you can't write a specific scene, searching for a picture of the place it is set in - or something similar - can help form some vivid description passages. I use this a lot when writing poetry.

 

My notes for this post are almost illegible.

 If I'm writing a more upbeat piece, then I turn to my trusty Taylor Swift album instead, and along with using a notebook, I can work through writer's block. I think. Picking up a battered lined notebook or journal is something I know immediately resort to in the face of having no ideas. Jotting down assorted scribblings, even doodling stars in the top-corner of the page, can lead to a whole post. Making lists; drawing spider-diagrams; re-writing the first line repeatedly until it feels 'right'. Notepads should be used like this.

 

Outsmarting writer's block is the most satisfying feeling; like when you find yourself almost halfway the first Game of Thrones novel. Planning ahead - not necessarily by scheduling all your blog posts for the next few months - but writing down a few ideas that you can use at any time, although not overcoming writer's block, is taking a different route around the problem. In the back of one of my favourite notepads I have a double page spread with titles of posts scrawled down; in the hope that they will rescue me from no uploading for a week next time.
 

How often do you experience writer's block?

How do you overcome it?

 What would you like to see covered in a future Blogger SOS post?

 

Tell me in the comments! 

 

*Definition from Wikipedia 

Anti Bullying Blog Week(Day 7) - FYIC Guest Post

Siobhan Curham is one of my favourite UKYA authors; and I have so much respect for the fact she has willingly shared her experiences of bullying, as well as writing a brilliant beat-bullying guide. You can download the novel, Finding Your Inner Cherokee, for FREE by clicking THIS link. I did give it 5 stars on Goodreads...

Anyway, here's a Guest Post by Siobhan herself where you can learn a lot more about FYIC!
 
***
I begin my e-book by talking about the four basic truths about being bullied. These are four truths I wish I’d known and believed back when I was being bullied.  

1. You are not alone 
2. What is happening is not your fault  
3. You have nothing to feel embarrassed about 
4. It will stop and your life will get better 

In this guest post I’d like to focus on TRUTH NUMBER ONE: You are not alone. 

According to UK government figures, 46.8% of young people will be bullied at some point and last year, 38.4% of young people were cyber-bullied. If you are being bullied, you definitely aren’t alone.  The trouble is, facts and figures aren’t much consolation when you’re too scared to go online, or filled with dread at the thought of going to school. So what if almost half of all young people will be bullied at some point? That fact doesn’t stop your pain. But it can go some way to easing it. Let me show you how.  

When I was being bullied I felt so alone. It was as if my world had shrunk right down until all it consisted of was me and my bully, because that’s all I thought about – all of the time. Even when I wasn’t anywhere near him, he still haunted my thoughts.  

 

This is what happens when you’re being bullied. Even when you aren’t anywhere near your bully you can become eaten up with fear, wondering what they’re going to do next. And so you stop thinking about other things – your friends, your family, the things you enjoy doing – and your world becomes a much smaller place. You feel as if you’re the only one going through this. You feel as if everyone else is having a great time. You can’t remember the last time you laughed and really meant it. You can’t remember the last time you woke up and didn’t instantly get that horrible sinking feeling. You can’t remember the last time you went to bed and fell straight into a deep and contented sleep. You feel all alone in your pain. 
 

 

But that fact is, you’re not alone, and if you’re being bullied I want you to see that fact as a tiny seed of hope. It’s the seed of hope that your long-term happiness will grow from. Many, many other people have experienced the pain of bullying. And many, many people have got through it and gone on to lead really happy and exciting lives. Here are just a few of them: Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Sandra Bullock, Tom Cruise, Kate Middeton, Prince Harry, Kate Winslet,  Lady Gaga, Tyra Banks, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake and Bill Clinton. 

The people in the above list overcame their bullying and went on to become mega successful actors, singers, artists and even the President of America! They all must have had moments when they just wanted to give up, or felt like there would never be an end to their suffering. But there was, and they’ve gone on to achieve amazing things since. 

 

In Finding Your Inner Cherokee I regularly share what I call power tweets. A power tweet is a statement that, like a tweet, has 140 characters or less, and packs a powerful punch. If you are being bullied and feeling all alone, write down the following power tweet and keep it somewhere you’ll see it regularly as a reminder: 

 

“Other people have got through this – and I will too.” 

 

You will, trust me. Although it might seem really hard to believe right now, what you are going through can actually end up making you a stronger, wiser person and help you lead a richer, more interesting life.  
 

And I am living proof of this truth.

Thank you so much to Siobhan for this snippet from FYIC. I can't tell you how much of a shock it was for me to hear people like Kristen Stewart and Emma Watson were bullied. I mean, they are unbelievably talented and so pretty!

Anti-Bullying Blog Week(Day 4) - Author Advice

 

 I can't quite believe we're on Day 4 already! That means we're already over-halfway through the week, and the respond has been fantastic! Today, it's the first group of authors offering their advice to people who are being bullied. Thank you to Natasha, Sharon and Cathy; your stories are really inspiring and thank you for sharing them with us, despite being so personal!

Natasha Ngan

I'm Natasha, a 23 year-old half-Chinese, half-English girl who still spends most of her time the way she did as a child - in her imagination! (And now she talks in third-person because she's so used to writing it ...) My debut YA novel The Elites, a futuristic YA adventure set in a multicultural city whose residents are streamed into jobs and social classes according to their DNA, came out in September from Hot Key Books. A second standalone novel, The Memory Keepers, comes out next year with them too. Follow my publishing journey and read about my thoughts on writing over at my author blog! Outside of writing, I love food, travelling, spending time with friends and family, long walks and lazy days spent curled in bed with a book. I also run a fashion and photography blog with my boyfriend! Come say hi to me on Twitter :)  

I was bullied at school in a way I didn't recognise clearly at the time as bullying, since it came from people I trusted and liked - my friends. Sadly, I think this type of bullying is far more common that we realise. It's often easiest to hurt the people you know best. I shared something personal with a couple of my closest friends, hoping for their advice and understanding. I was 15. No matter how mature I felt at the time, looking back I can see just how young and naive I was. I wasn't perfect, and I did something I'm not proud of, but I thought my friends would help. Instead, one of them told a few others at the school, and the news travelled from there. No one asked for my own explanation, and the rumours blew what happened vastly out of proportion. Many of my friends started ignoring me or saying things about me when I was nearby loudly enough for me to hear. It went on for what felt like months (maybe it was). The worst thing was, I blamed myself entirely for what happened, because these were my friends - surely they'd only turn on me if I was the horrible one? 

 

It took a long time for me to get over what happened. I tried staying friends with the two girls I had initially told my 'secret' to, but there was just something broken between us. Eventually, I moved on, spending my free time at school either studying (lots and lots, which I guess helped me - I ended up going to Cambridge University to study my degree) or hanging out with a lovely new group of girls who already had their clique but welcomed me so warmly, and I'm still friends with some of them today. Handling bullying at school is hard. I wish I could go back and talk to my younger self - tell her it's alright, that school is temporary, that these people aren't the only people in the world. That soon I'll grow and mature, and find my own peace with what happened. Because I have done. I have found true friends, I had a wonderful experience at university, and am now working on things I truly believe in and love. But most of all, I have learnt to forgive myself. We are all human. We all make mistakes. But real friends are the ones who will help us learn from them and better ourselves, to move on positively from our wrongs into a brighter future. 

Sharon Sant

Hi there!  

 

 

I’m Sharon Sant. I live in Staffordshire with my family and I write young adult fantasy and paranormal books, including the Sky Song trilogy, Runners and The Memory Game. You can check out my blog at www.sharonsant.com or I’m always on Twitter for a chat @sharonsant.  I come from a big, working class family with four kids and we never had much money. That meant that we often had to wear hand-me-down clothes or stuff from jumble sales, and that our house was pretty ramshackle. Surprisingly, although I did get picked on at school for being poor (and also for being the shortest kid in the class and for my mum being just a little bit eccentric!) when I look back on it now, I don’t feel like I was particularly bullied. Instead, today I want to talk about my best friend, who did get bullied, and why I wish I had dealt with her bullying differently.   

 

In my book, The Memory Game, David joins in his friend’s bullying of unpopular girl, Bethany. But David really only does this because he’s so afraid of being bullied himself if he goes against his friend. I wrote David that way, because that’s sort of how I dealt with my friend’s bullying problems. I didn’t actively participate, but I’m ashamed to say that I stood by and did nothing to help her and that is just as bad. Sure, I comforted her when we were in private, and I felt incredibly sorry for her, but when we were out together and it started, I didn’t intervene. I was so close to being a target myself because of my family and home life that I was terrified if I did step in, I would become the bullied kid instead.  

 

I’m so lucky that my friend is a gorgeous and forgiving person and, even years later, we’re still best friends.  We still talk about the bullying too, and I know that it still hurts her all these years later, but she understands why I behaved the way I did. If anything, I think that the way I behaved when we were teenagers ultimately damaged me more than her, because I have to carry the guilt of letting her suffer. And out of the two of us, she’s actually become more successful – she has an incredible job as a radiographer and a degree in fine art. She’s funny, popular and interesting and totally together as a person.  So I suppose this post is more about standing up to bullies on behalf of someone else. You can save someone a lot of heartache with a few brave words. You can save yourself a lot of heartache too. You just have to do the right thing.

Cathy Cassidy

 

Hi... I'm Cathy Cassidy and I write books for preteens and young teens. My current series is the Chocolate Box Girls, but some of my stand-alone books deal with quite hard-hitting themes. I've written about bullying a few times, in Driftwood, Angel Cake and Gingersnaps. You can find me here...www.cathycassidy.com 

or 

https://www.facebook.com/cathycassidyauthor  

or 

instagram @cathycassidy 

or 

on twitter... @cathycassidyxx 

  

I'm lucky because I have never had to handle full-on bullying, just teasing. I was picked on for being very tall - at age 11 I was 5'8" and towered above my school friends... and most of the teachers! Luckily, this meant that few people took the teasing any further - bullies tend to be cowards, and look for someone vulnerable, so my height probably saved me when I think about it! Later, as an art teacher in both secondary and primary schools, I saw just how damaging bullying could be; and my job as a teen mag agony aunt for twelve years showed me how many kids were affected by this. I feel very strongly that bullying should never be acceptable... and that every child - and adult - has the right to work without being harassed and tormented. I've written about the subject several times because I want kids to think about how it feels to be on the receiving end... and to care enough to want to change things. 

 

I've thought about what makes someone a bully, and I believe that bullies are insecure and unhappy. They look for power by making others feel small, but ultimately they hurt themselves too... they need help just as much as their victims. Not all bullies can change, but some can - I wrote a short story about a girl called Lily, the bully from my book Angel Cake, which shows why she treats others so badly. It's a sad story, alas! Sometimes, my book events take the form of Friendship Festivals which encourage others to celebrate friendship and make new friends, and the Friendship Charter on my website asks readers to report and challenge bullies whenever they can. 

Keep reading, keep smiling… and follow your dreams! 

Best Wishes,  Cathy Cassidy x