I've been under a lot of stress working lately, and have lacked my enthusiasm for doing many of the personal things I love. That includes writing and anything creative. I feel frightened to write, but I don't really know why. I can write a lot of notes but as soon as I think I might write something that can be turned into something else later, my words dry up. I don't know why. Any tips on overcoming this or at least, getting through it? I want to write more than anything.
I don't know how you're feeling about analysing yourself but you might want to dig in what scares you so about turning ideas into stories. My guess would be: it's a dash of perfectionism, mixed with the fear of turning the perfect idea into a not perfect thing. Because the result can never hold up to the grandness of the original idea.
It's up to you how you want to deal with that, my method is usually to stick out my tongue at the brainworms and tell them that they don't know shit. And also that it's just a story, nobody dies if it isn't perfect.
I'm always saying that you should work with your brain and not against it, so how about you challenge your brain? Make it a challenge to write.
Here's a few challenge ideas:
Close your eyes, turn your head, open your eyes for a second and "take a picture" of what you see. Use that "picture" as a prompt and write a snippet about it.
Set a timer to ten minutes, start writing and only write for these ten minutes. You're not allowed to write more.
Start writing for the length of a song and don't use any punctuation.
Write a drabble to a prompt. A drabble is exactly 100 words.
Make a cup of tea and write for as long as it takes you to drink it all.
Pick something you read somewhere, write down the first line and continue from there with your own stuff for fifteen minutes.
To get you back into the ease of writing, make this a short thing. A quick challenge for maybe half an hour. Don't force yourself to sit there for hours when you're tired and creatively exhausted. It's just a bit of gymnastics to keep your brain up and running.
You said that you're stressed and that means you need rest. Resting is not laziness. Don't sacrifice the time you need to recharge to the altar of writing.
