When you feel your writing is starting to become a struggle or the dreaded symptoms of writer's block are descending upon you, it's easy to panic.
But all writers have peaks and lulls in their writing, we can't be writing at our very best every time we sit down to create.
The secret is not to feel that when your writing's getting a little sticky it means you're about to enter a huge block that will last months or years, or that you'll never be able to write anything of any worth ever again.
A great technique to help you do this is to have a store of creative writing exercises and prompts close to hand.
Writing exercises and prompts can help give you that spark of inspiration when you feel you're lacking any.
Writing exercises also help you to explore new ways and directions of writing that you might not have tried before. The more experienced you become as a writer, the better, the richer and the more rewarding your writing becomes, both to you as the writer, and to your readers.
So why don't more writers use writing exercises?
The main issue is that we feel they are somehow a short cut to creating. We feel that when we write it should be completely 100% our own work, and by using a writing exercise or prompt as starting point, we're somehow cheating.
This simply isn't the case. Imagine you're a chef who's just starting out. You have a natural love of food and understand how different flavours combine and enhance each other.
But you haven't cooked many different dishes and want to gain more experience. You'd like to start with a lasagna but you've never made one before, and you're not even sure what all the necessary ingredients are. What you could do is gather together a huge range of ingredients and simply experiment by throwing together different flavours and seeing what develops. This might be a lot of fun for a while but it will take you a long time to find combinations that work well and you're likely to get frustrated in the process.
The alternative is to start with a basic recipe. So you find a few recommended lasagna recipes, see what the common ingredients are and try cooking them yourself.
Then, once you have the basic form of the dish mastered, you can begin to add your own little flourishes and secret ingredients, to make it your unique lasagna dish. If you didn't start with those basic recipes as a guideline and were simply guessing what went into a tasty lasagna, you might have taken weeks and dozens of wasted attempts to get even close to a delicious lasagna.
It's similar with writing.
Creative writing exercises provide a recipe, a framework to get you going in a new direction you might not have tried before.
Once you start and understand the technique, you're completely free to experiment with it, evolve it into your own style and writing voice.
There may be exercises you enjoy so much they become one of your most trusted and reliable ways of writing creatively. There may be other methods you try that you don't really enjoy or don't suit your writing aims and style. Either way, each time you try a new writing exercise, you return to your writing a wiser, more experienced writer, and writing will come far more easily to you. And that can only be a good thing.
So use some creative writing exercises today and unleash those writing abilities in you just waiting to be discovered.