“When words don’t come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing.”
Strider Marcus Jones, Poet
Writer’s Block? – 5 Tips to Reset Your Creativity with Blackout Poetry
If only a method of silence worked for every author stuck in the mire of writer’s block. Reset your innovation with the unorthodox method of blackout poetry below! Blackout poetry is a great way to stir up your creative juices in a matter of minutes, AND hit the mental reset button on your current project.
You don’t need to be a poet to write a blackout poem, especially when using free verse. Free verse is a common choice among modern poets as it allows the author to disregard the usage of meter and rhyming words.
Ready to reset your mind with 10 minutes of blackout poetry? Below are five tips to allow your imaginative brain to take a short vacation from writer’s block burn-out while still producing a quality piece of prose:
- For those of you who are new to blackout – simply take a page of a newspaper, online journal, book, or your angst-riddled 6th grade diary. Create a prose poem on the topic of your choice utilizing the words on the page, and blackout the remaining that are not being put to use.
- Pick a strong word and build out from there. I learned quickly it was near impossible to start at the top and work my way down. If you can’t choose one word, underline (in pencil) a few that stick out to you. Try focusing on nouns and verbs first, then throwback to your elementary grammar class by filling in the rest of the syntactic structure with pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. It’s a lot easier to locate words such as “with” and “but” than to hope the subject of your poem is located within the final sentence on that page.
- “No books were harmed in the making of this blog entry.” One of the most common questions I receive from readers is, “why would you destroy a whole book to use a single page?” The answer is – I don’t, and you don’t have to. Feel free to photocopy a page out of a book, or simply write the poem in your journal without actually scribbling anything out. Now I personally do sharpie blackout pages, but my process is to use a handful of books repeatedly. Each was purchased as a dog-eared, second-hand book that appeared to have a few to several previous owners/readers. Rather than ending up in a landfill, these used books have a chance at a second life as a piece of artwork. Stay tuned for my upcoming post on purchasing used books!
- Whatever your writer’s block and ongoing project is on – choose a completely different topic, emotion, or style to fabricate your blackout poem. Writing a mystery novel? Create a poem on love. Sci-fi fanatic? Try describing a picturesque nature scene.
- Want to take your inspiration a step further than I do? Try coloring in a picture to go along with your poem on the page.
There is no wrong way to overcome writer’s block. Take a bubble bath, stroll through your neighborhood, or give blackout poetry a try. Sometime designing a completely different short poem or story just may give you enough of a distraction to hit the next “light-bulb moment” in your work.
How have you previously overcome writer’s block in the past?
