The ten-minute secret to break out of any writing block
Hello, friend, and congratulations on your creative block!
Okay, first off, let’s address that opening line. It probably seems very odd to suggest feeling enthusiastic about being stuck (after all, you came here to discover how to get unstuck).
When you’re in a block, it feels like you’ll never find your way back to that generative threshold where your story is just waiting to meet your words. It can feel like the block is the truth about you as a storyteller, like there was never anything waiting for you but a dead end.
But I’m here to tell you that the opposite is true.
You’re blocked because there’s a transformative, illuminating story inside you that wants to get out. That’s why nothing you’ve been putting on the page is hitting quite right—your inner storyteller intuits there’s something more powerful under the surface.
If you’ve been trying the standard tricks for breaking a creative rut, but nothing’s worked, don’t give up. There’s a simple, quick, but deep-hitting practice that can transform your block and get you writing again.
Here’s the secret: To rediscover your story, you need to feel your story. Literally feel it, as an embodied presence, place, and personality.
This might sound like a pretty complex concept for a tool I just described as “simple and quick.” Don’t worry—the practice itself is easy to implement. So easy, in fact, that it can become a daily source of fast inspiration to keep that blank page from stopping you in your tracks.
If you want to jump straight into the practice now, drop your email below and get automagical inbox access to the Sensory Story Exploration workbook. But for all you fellow theory nerds, keep reading for the why behind the how.
Why the standard tricks aren’t working
The typical advice for breaking through blocks falls into one of three camps: the More Planning camp, the Word Dump camp, and the Stop Writing camp.
The More Planning approach relies on analytical craft skills—things like character models, book outlines, or plot formulas. The Word Dump camp is all about pure, unfocused activity—keeping your fingers or your dictation app busy until something promising comes out. And when all else fails, the Stop Writing camp sends you off to watch some nice sunsets or binge your favorite movies.
These three approaches definitely have their place (if nothing else, chilling the hell out for a while in the company of nature or art is pretty great advice for all of us, all the time).
But when you have a deeply expansive, visionary story to tell, anxious analytical planning and word dumping can both take you further away from your story, not closer to it.
It can be intimidating to fully access our most luminous, mythic, and inspired storytelling—so we may unknowingly bury it in endless “productive” but empty word count. It’s also difficult to mesh our deepest creative vision with formulaic approaches to planning a draft.
And if you’re anything like me, stopping altogether runs a pretty big risk that you’ll never find your way back to this particular story. Which would be a huge loss, both for you and for the readers who could be touched and transformed by your words.
Luckily, there are ways to generate new ideas and momentum directly from the wellspring of inspiration that drove you to create this story in the first place.
How your senses can break the block
Often when we get stuck in a writer’s block, what’s really blocked is our sense wonder.
We’ve lost that generative expectation and curiosity we felt when the story first stepped forward and we just knew with our whole selves there’s something to discover here.
We’ve stopped engaging with our story as a living and vibrant presence. Instead, we’re in panic mode. We’re producing the draft like it’s a problem to solve, or an inanimate machine: plot diagrams bolted to character arcs powered by themes.
To break the block, you need to short-circuit your stress response and get back in touch with what’s lost under the words.
One of the most effective ways I’ve found to do this is by directly engaging the senses. Grounding in our senses helps move us away from anxious analysis and into a relaxed, receptive state of curiosity.
In scientific terms, we’re shifting out of our parasympathetic, fight-or-flight mind and into our sympathetic mind, where creativity is safe to flow.
Or, to put it more poetically: Our most visionary stories speak the language of intuition and inner alchemy, not the language of formulas and quantitative goals. So we need something more intuitive to bring that story out.
Following our senses, we can recreate our original awareness of the story, the embodied imagining that had us so excited to start writing. It’s like rewinding back to the moment you and the story first “met,” before you even had any words on the page—but within the context of where you currently are in your draft.
By recruiting your senses to do the exploring, you engage with your deep intuition on its own terms, allowing the power of the unexpected to break blocks and shift you back into creative discovery.
Unlocking the power of your senses
So, how do we actually do this?
Any practice that helps you apply your senses to your story can lead to inspiring revelations. There’s no right or wrong way to go about it.
To get started, think about the types of sensory details that emerged as you were first getting to know your story. Try to really feel them in your body. How does that embodied tapestry hint at elements of the story you didn’t realize were there?
Like I said, there’s no wrong way to do this, so don’t let perfection stand in your way. But if you’d like a simple, step-by-step method to tap into your sensory brilliance, I’ve created a (free) workbook that shares my own favorite way to put this intuitive strategy into action. I call it the Sensory Story Exploration.
The best thing about this tool? It’s completely adaptable to where you’re at with any writing block. You can do an exploration in as little as five to ten minutes, for a quick boost to finish a writing session. Or you can embark on an hour-long brainstorm to align your drafting sprint with your deep vision (so you’ll actually keep those words you’re counting).
It’s up to you, your story, and how you most love to work.
If you’d like to discover this powerful (but simple!) practice and add it to your creative magic kit, all you need is your inbox and your curiosity.
Drop your email below to get access to the workbook, including an audio walkthrough of your very first Sensory Story Exploration.
And remember, your writer’s block doesn’t have to be the end of this story. It’s just the next beginning.