The Mustang team has been participating in these regular blog posts for a while now. It’s a fun way for us to show more sides of our personality and creativity as both a team and individually, and every once in a while provide some insight into our own areas of expertise. For me, that’s writing and editing.
I’ve never had a problem with these blog posts. I enjoy doing them, and usually have a few ideas or intro paragraphs lined up. But then something silly happened toward the end of 2011: I ran out of my list of blog post ideas. Even sillier? I didn’t write any new ones down (I blame holiday chaos). And then, all of the sudden (but not really at all since we have a schedule), it was my turn this week, and it happened: writer’s block.
I had no idea what to write about. The cursor blinked over and over again on my painfully blank, blindingly white Word document. I went to my first trick: just start typing. I ended up writing a lovely blog post about my New Year’s resolution to read more fiction, and realized it dissolved into a rant about failing to balance my love for fiction with my love for trashy reality TV. Not the stuff of great Mustang blog posts.
I switched to another tactic: work on something else. In this case, research for a client. The idea here is that I’d get other work done while simultaneously thinking of something to blog about. What actually happened is half of my brain focused on research while the other half focused on my inability to come up with a decent blog post. The result? Doing half as good a job on the research that I needed to. Not the stuff of great Mustang work.
Then I recalled a lesson I read in a writer’s magazine: to take creative breaks, allowing the ideas in your head to marinate without overwhelming or exhausting yourself. The key here was to not do something that required a lot of cognitive effort: do the dishes, throw in a load of laundry, vacuum. Something that requires basic, minimal attention but is a break from the work at hand nonetheless. Now, I can’t actually do tasks like these because it’s not actual work, and that is, after all, what I’m doing at Mustang Marketing, but I did the best equivalent: I organized my physical and computer desktops—I organized, I sorted, I tossed the old and reminded myself of projects and items that needed attention.
And then I remembered that this was a really great piece of advice, which probably meant it was worth blogging about. Here’s hoping!
-Danny Bracco, Director of Communications