First, what is a creative – or writer’s – block? It’s when you lose the ability to create, or at least you may feel that way. It can be rather frustrating and the frustration can make you even less capable of creating than you were initially. Before we look at how to cope with it, we will find out what causes it.

The major causes of a block can be broadly categorized for example like below.

• A faulty creative process – if your creative method is not suitable for yourself and the task at hand, you may get stuck.
• The creative task at hand is really not possible to solve – it’s easy to misjudge the difficulty level or time requirements.
• Your state of mind – Could be because something temporary, like a recent fight or loss or something more permanent as depression or health problems.

Here are some suggestions for what you can do:

1. Look at the process – is there any other way you can solve this problem which is more efficient or more suitable for your personal style? How have other people solved similar tasks? If you are writing, maybe you need to switch from computer to pen and paper or make it a habit to write a certain times during the day. If there are other people involved, talk to them and share your ideas.
2. If you think you have misjudged your skills or the time it will take to do whatever  you are trying to do, maybe what you need to do is to split up the task into smaller pieces and do them one at a time. Or maybe you should “kill your darlings” and really stop working on this particular project and do something else instead.
3. Your mind is your most important asset. It’s easily affected by events in your surroundings which can leave you devastated and depressed. You need to nurture your brain and your body, to be able to cope with things that happen to you. Try to maintain diet (yeah, some of us mostly live on coffee, but sometimes even we should put in a meal with vegetables there), some relaxation once in a while, see or make some new friends, do your share of excercise and so on. If you kill your body, your brain will suffer too. If something really terrible happened that brought you into the black hole, then maybe you should stop pushing yourself for a while and accept that there are moments in life which really suck and it will be like that for a while. Things will get better, though, eventually.
4. Get new input! An mportant factor for creativity is what information we feed our neural networks. Your brain will start re-wiring and build new ideas if you go out in the world and see and do new things and meet new people. If you are already the traveller type, maybe you should start looking in your local neighbourhood.
5. If the above failed, look into Buddhism or altered brain chemistry, perhaps? Or a random word.