Post-Adventure Report: Potent Cures to Writer's Block

For my job as an art reporter, I have to constantly produce stories. I can't tell my boss, sorry boss wala kang diyaryo bukas, writer's block eh. When I was just starting out, I didn't know how I'd survive. Thankfully, I just did. Along the way I discovered tips and tricks on how to cure writer's block. Not permanently, but what you can do is quicken the time of recovery from your recurring illness. I learned this from books and personal experiences. Then, I created the writing challenges for Freewriting Adventures' March 29, 2014 event called Potent Cures to Writer's Block at the Rizal Park (Luneta).

Here at Freewriting Adventures we believe that to write creatively, the learning process must be as imaginative as the masterpieces that we produce. That's why our participants aren't shuttled into a traditional classroom; we let them run wild through Manila parks and kooky streets. At every interesting stop, we throw them a curious writing challenge that will help them solve their inky icky problem

Our ice breaker that day was inspired by Wreck this Book by Keri Smith. In that book, there was a page with an outline of a paper airplane, and I realized that it's been so long since I played with paper planes. I asked participants to write an encouraging word on a piece of paper, make a paper airplane out of it, and then we did an interrupted freewriting session.

Every two minutes we threw the paper plane, followed it, and wrote there. At every stop we had to freewrite, which means to write without judgement, without editing, without stopping, without crossing out any words, without thinking, without considering grammar and spelling, without evaluating if we were writing something interesting or not, without worrying about if we were writing something boring or not.

Freewriting is an exercise of writing down first thoughts, which is the potion of freedom that can cure writer's block. First thoughts is something that I learned from Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones. Ms. Golberg says, "The aim is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel."

After the freewriting session, we huddled back together. Then we opened the paper airplane, and I told the participants that this will be the first word of the story that they will create, and that they will create this story spontaneously, as in they'll just go stand in front of everybody, and begin reciting a story that they've made up on the spot.

Then the remaining participants will "hurl objects at the story teller", a storytelling exercise that I got from my friend's sister who competes at story telling contests. We won't literally throw things at the storyteller, but participants will blurt out the name of any object, and the storyteller has to integrate that object into the story that he or she is telling.

This exercise functions as the potion of spontaneity, another cure to writer's block and another effective remedy to those pesky uninspiring days.

Freewriting Adventures is headed by Ja Cruz. With a Bachelor of Fine Arts Major in Creative Writing, she graduated Cum Laude from the Ateneo de Manila University and received the Creative Writing Program Award. The Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippine Star, and Cosmopolitan Magazine have published her articles. She worked at Summit Media’s Female Network as an editorial assistant, and she is currently an art reporter for a newspaper.

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*Note: The opinions expressed in this blog do not represent the official views of the companies, organizations, or institutions that I am associated with. These opinions are solely my own.