Coping Strategies
As far as strategies for coping with writer's block Clark describes: class and group discussion, journals, free writing and brainstorming, clustering, list making, and engaging with the text. To overcome writing blocks, Oliver suggests that asking students questions to uncover their writing process. Then he recommends solutions such as systematic questioning, freewriting, and encouragement.
Garbriele Lusser Rico's concern with the mind links to brain lateralization also explored by Rose and Linda Flowers and John R. Hayes among others. Rico's book, Writing the Natural Way looks into invention strategies, such as clustering, which has been noted to be an invention strategy used to help writers overcome their blocks, and further emphasizes the solutions presented in works by Rose, Oliver, and Clark. Similar to Rico, James Adams discusses right brain involvement in writing. While Downey purposes that he is basing his approach in practical concerns, his concentration on right brain techniques speaks to cognitive theory approach similar to Rico's and a more practical advise for writers to approach their writer's block.
Author Julia Cameron advocates the practice of morning pages as a remedy to writer's block. Morning pages are three handwritten pages of free writing where the purpose is to write without the intention of using the writing for anything. It is a practice that can bring your thoughts to the surface and allow you to enter a more creative zone.
Read more about this topic: Writer's Block
Famous quotes containing the words coping and/or strategies:
“Acknowledging separation feelings directly and sympathetically is the best way of coping with them. It is actually helpful to tell a toddler “I’ll miss you,” or “I will think of you during the day,” or “It is hard to say goodbye,” or “I can’t wait to see you at the end of the day.” These messages tell the child that he is important to the parent even when they are not together and that out of sight need not mean out of mind.”
—Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)
“By intervening in the Vietnamese struggle the United States was attempting to fit its global strategies into a world of hillocks and hamlets, to reduce its majestic concerns for the containment of communism and the security of the Free World to a dimension where governments rose and fell as a result of arguments between two colonels’ wives.”
—Frances Fitzgerald (b. 1940)