Write, Write, Write...Right?

Stephen King once said, "If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that."

As writers, we journey along a path filled with ideas, adventures and breathtaking scenery. On occasion, we find ourselves alone on a dirt road with open fields of dead crops. There are moments when our imaginary friends converse with us, offer us trinkets of plot twists and a sip from a creative concoction like gypsies that come and go as they please, and we indulge to our hearts' content.

What happens when our friends desert us for days, weeks or months at a time? When they choose not to talk with us and linger along another road to avoid crossing our paths, we are left to wander aimlessly along the valleys of our thoughts.

It gets lonely.

Some might say that a writer who isn't a recluse isn't a writer at all, and there is some truth to that, because we usually prefer that time alone, we need that silence to be able to hear the whispers of our imaginary friends and carry on that conversation. We need that undisturbed block of time to lose ourselves and find that hidden treasure that others will want to lose themselves in too!

But when we can't bear the silence, and when we feel abandoned by characters that saunter into our stories to remind us that they exist, even if only in our imagination, then we must read!

This may sound counter-intuitive to a writer, since our primary objective is to write. Write, write, write. Right?

It's who we are, it's what we do!

Then it happens. We become parched. We thirst for that creative juice that ignites our fanciful ideas, much like that person who gets drunk and thinks that they're ex-lover wants to hear from them in the middle of the night, and we write everything that comes to mind.

When this doesn't happen, however, then we have to be open to the alternative.

Read.

Read something that pertains to your story. I have found that research material i.e. mythology, ancient history, or physics helps to lure my imaginary friends out of hiding. They catch that scent of inspiration and quickly return to add their "two cents," because they can no more resist the urge to return than we writers can resist the urge to write.

So read, my friends. Read whatever you can get your hands on, feast your minds on those countless pages that someone else wrote while their imaginary friends talked with them and you may just find what it is that you need to write!

"Writers Block: When your imaginary friends stop talking to you." ~Linda Nee