Writer's Block - Take a Nap

     Sometimes our writing muses hide either in fear from the anxieties of life rushing through our brains screaming like drunken banshees to pay attention to them and not our creativity. Our minds calculate the bills to pay or children to pick up from school. We feel threatened by the dirty house demanding our attention, a pile of dirty dishes about to topple our sanity. Many times self-doubt can scare them off as well, the fears of our inadequacy building like a poison vapor clogging rational thought and killing the will to even try something new. Or else we strain too hard to chase our muses, encouraging a game of hide and seek. Our thoughts flit away, sentences and plots hidden behind an exhausted mind.
     So stop chasing them. Like a cat who realizes it's being ignored, your creativity will come back to you. But first you must relax and let your mind become soft. Close your eyes to the dirty house, sleep off the anxiety, dream away your fears.
     So many writing experts have advised a nap as a cure for writer's block. Stephanie Meyer's dreamed up a romance between a vampire and a human giving birth to the popular Twilight series.  Stephen King came up with the plot for his book, Misery while napping on an airplane trip. Mary Shelley took her nightmare of reanimated corpses and woke up to begin writing Frankenstein.
     When the brain finally gives up the fight, releasing itself to the magic of the subconscious, miracles happen. That's why so many writer's also advise keeping a notebook by the bedside. Our ideas flow so much easier through the open conduit of our relaxed and sleepy brain. I find so many of my scenes writing themselves in those moment just before R.E.M sleep and in those pre-waking moments of the morning when my brain starts coming out of the ocean of my dreams like a swimmer seeking the surface but bringing the memory of an underwater kingdom.
     In fact, the whole plot for my young adult novel revealed itself to me one late August morning two years ago as I lay drowsy and half-dreaming that I was talking to Benedict Cumberbatch about a movie I had written that he and Lily Collins should star in. My lackadaisical mind wandered through the dream, eyes half-open behind closed lids as I let the whole story play out. Then bringing the magic with me into this realm, I grabbed a notebook and quickly dashed out the character bios and the outline of the plot before I lost it. That same plot idea and theme actually reinvented itself three times through early morning dreams giving birth to my feature-length screenplay, Elaine the Fair; my young adult novel, Daydream Girl, and an idea for a stage play I must write some day.
     My current novel, Retreat also came from a very visceral dream I had while napping one afternoon after a sleepless night. While my sons played quietly in the other room, my thoughts shaped themselves into a narrative, a seductive twist on a ghost story and for several nights afterwards I wrote scenes as they played across my imagination like watching a movie of the story I wanted to tell.
     Now I know, we don't always have the luxury to take a nap. Life happens, I get it. But for those moments that you do have time and aren't making any progress anyway as you stare at a blank page deleting more than writing, go take a power nap. Let the mind become soft and malleable, a grey matter clay for your own creative spirit to shape into something amazing.