Writing Tutorial: exercises to break creative blocks

Discover tricks to overcome a creative block when writing a text, with Cristina López Barrio

Facing the blank page is one of the biggest and most common challenges for those who decide to create through writing. Cristina López Barrio (@cristinalopezbarrio), writer, screenwriter and teacher, knows this, because throughout her own professional career she has had to develop tricks to be able to do it and beat the emptiness of the paper.

Today, Cristina shares with you some practical exercises that will help you not only to take that first step, but also to give structure to any kind of story you want to develop. Enjoy them in the following video!

1. Cooking emotions

To put the mind to work, one exercise Cristina recommends is to associate ideas with specific emotions, imagining that you are working with a recipe. In this case, for example, she uses the feeling of nostalgia as a guide to draw up a list of ingredients needed to cook it.

2. Geometric figures

Using basic figures to determine the narrative structure of a story is another of the tips Cristina proposes in this tutorial. If we have a circle, we would know that the story would end in the same place or the same situation where it starts, and that it closes on itself. Another idea is to play with parallel lines, which would indicate, for example, that two characters follow similar paths but never meet.

3. Playing with words

This exercise consists of deforming words and playing with emerging ideas. It is as simple as creating new words using prefixes and suffixes to spark the imagination and bring new stories to life.

4. Fantastic binomial

For this exercise, you must think of two words and associate them in a specific way, imagine all the possibilities in which both concepts can be related, so that a new story is generated.

If you liked this tutorial and want to learn the keys to create a novel and stimulate your imagination with simple exercises, don't miss Cristina's course, Writing a novel step by step.

You may also be interested in:

-What is a short story and what is a novel.
-Tips to encourage you to write a novel.
-5 books on writing to inspire your creative routines.
- 7 tips to find writing inspiration