Finding the Medium for your Muse

Sometimes you look at the blank screen and it just stays blank.  There's nothing.  No inspiration.  No ideas.  No words.  You know you're supposed to be writing something, anything, and nothing is coming.  You've turned off the television, turned down the music, and walked away from all of the distractions, but there's nothing to fill the void.

Sometimes I despair and turn on the television, because if I'm not going to write anyway, I might as well be entertained while doing nothing.  But sometimes there is another option.  Sometimes there is a way to tease the muse out of the recesses of my unconscious.  Sometimes I pull out a cheap composition book, turn to a page I've started writing something on, and...write.  

What?  What happened to not being able to write anything?  What happened to that writer's block?  Sometimes the blank screen is too big, too overwhelming, too...blank to write anything.  It's just too much emptiness to fill.  But an inexpensive notebook?  I feel more free to make mistakes and the words flow more easily.  This is probably because it takes few of them to fill a line and fewer of them to fill a page, so I feel like I'm making more progress (even though it's just an illusion of font size).

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm totally a type to the screen kind of person.  Sometimes I type faster than I talk.  When I'm in the writing groove, my fingers fly, and the words flow like water through a sieve.  And when I'm stuck, I'm really stuck, and putting the words down is a torturous exercise in futility.  But something about putting pen (or pencil) to paper is different.  I really do feel more free to make mistakes and cross them out and then go back to them again (something that you can't really do with the delete key on your computer).  Sometimes, when nothing is appearing on the screen, it's just easier to write it down the old fashioned way.  And once the creative juices get flowing, transferring it from paper to screen is a simple enough task and continuing from wherever I left off on the page seems effortless.

Now, of course, you should use whatever medium inspires you.  If you like to type to screen (like me), turn on your computer, warm up your fingers, and get to typing.  If you like putting pen to paper, buy a bunch of pens and some notebooks and get to writing.  If you like to write using a typewriter, get out your typewriter and some paper and get to typing.  Heck, if you like to write with your thumbs on your mobile device, do that!  But when you get stuck with whatever you're writing, consider switching mediums to see if that helps you approach the problem differently.