Writers Block and Trigger Exercises

Sometimes we can just sit down in front of our laptops/typewriters/notepads and we begin. Something clicks in our heads and it happens, we're writing! But what do we do when we want to write and we're just sat there with nothing?
           Writers block. It's a phrase muttered fearfully in the literary world. It sounds dirty in our mouths. When someone asks us what we're writing and we mumble we've got 'the block' and cast our heads to the ground before quickly changing the subject. Here are some tips and devices to help with the initial stage of writing: coming up with an idea.

TRIGGERS:

• Pick up the closest book to you. Skip to a random page, and select the first sentence you see. Use that as the first line of your poem/prose/play.
• Go somewhere. Go sit in a park, or a coffee shop, or the pub, or your friends house, or a public loo and write about this setting.
• People watch! This is one of my favourites. You can do this anywhere, on the bus, or train, in tesco's... or even when you're sat in Starbucks with a mocha. Watch people around you, take notes on interesting things you see.
• Carry a notebook. This is something my flatmate does all the time. Write down interesting snippets of dialogue, things you see, anything that could possibly inspire you. 
• Read! Read books, plays, poems, films, articles, shopping lists, scribbles on the bathroom wall, greetings cards... you get the idea. Read everything.
• Look at photographs. Sometimes writing can be a snapshot of life, looking at photographs and exploring the stories behind them can be a great starting point. 

Give these things ago and see what ideas/emotions they trigger. They might spark something, or they might just be useful habits to get into. 

Hello!

Welcome to PAGEFOLIO! This is a blog designed to help you explore 'the creative process' and what this means. It's looking at ways in which a flicker of an idea can be transformed and how it eventually becomes a finished piece. We'll look at those difficult in between stages that can make any writer want to procrastinate under a duvet with the company of a bottle of wine and a Netflix subscription.

So, what can you expect from this blog? 

• Trigger exercises - Ways of forming initial ideas.
• What forms and why? - Working out which form is going to be best for your ideas
• Structure - Do we really need to plan?
• Workshopping - What is workshopping? Why does it matter? 
• Reading and Analysing - Will this help your writing? 
• Editing and Grammar - A painful but needed part of the process. How can we make this bearable? 

Overall this is going to be an exploration of how you can build your own portfolio of pages.

Let's do some words!