Writer's freeze

The key word in your post is "try." Don't try to think creatively. That's too self aware for the mechanism to work. Literally just daydream. Stare out the window and just drift with your thoughts with no intention of being "creative." Eventually things will come to you and you'll build up enuf of a base to work more consciously from.

As for worrying that it won't be any good -- that's pretty much a sure sign you are a creative person. We all feel that way!

What Paul said. Please, please, everyone, stop judging your ideas. An idea is just a germ; you don't know yet what it's going to grow into. A good story comes from its execution.

Think about a book—any book you know well—and boil it down to its most basic idea. Now that idea may not be the exact idea the author had but it'll be pretty darn close.

The idea: What if two people who loathe each other at first sight and are vocal about it to any and all who'll listen eventually fall in love? (Pride and Prejudice).

Another idea: What if a naive and inexperienced young woman falls in love and marries a man then learns he's suspected of killing his first wife? (Rebecca).

Another thought is to look into various brainstorming techniques. There are formal ways of spitballing ideas just to accumulate them. This kind of structure may help you get past the "freeze" and begin to amass material that you can later massage into something bigger and better.

Plenty of stuff online about this. Might work for you.

If it helps, I frequently--even during mundane tasks of the day--ask myself, "What if this happened?" Sometimes the idea goes nowhere while other times it leads to something neat and from which I can build a story. I based an entire novel on my answer to that simple question one day. Instead of trying to think creatively, just give your mind opportunities to do so. When it happens to come up with something great, seize it and run with it. It honestly worked for me.

You are definitely not alone. It's a really big boat, and we're in it with you, life jackets on. Paul Lamb is correct about daydreaming; It's so important to open your thoughts and just let whatever comes take hold then use those thoughts.
Maybe some objectivity would help too? Have you heard of the left brain/right brain thing? Betty Edwards in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain explains it so well. Her book is for people who want to learn to draw and "see" how artists do, but her theory applies to us writers too, I've found. We're right brained people. When writing, we live in the right, creative side of our brains that believes anything is possible, that black text on a white page can make perfect strangers feel like they're our characters. The left side of the brain, the logical, "that's not real because your character isn't a real person," fights us every step of the way. It plants doubt gremlins, and once their nasty little teeth grab on, we're well on the way to thinking our writing and ideas totally suck. Maybe when that first tension at an idea hits, tell yourself it's just doubt gremlins, the left side of your brain objecting. Daydreaming then writing is an excellent way to shut Ol' Lefty up. Also, like Betty Edwards suggested free drawing (emptying your mind, letting the pencil or brush move across the paper without thought or direction), free writing helps. Maybe concentrate on something that has nothing to do with your WIP: a shrub in bloom on the lawn, your dog's face...whatever. Open your mind, think of all the descriptive phrases and words you can for your subject then write a description, stopping only when all the words are out of you. Seems like, for me and some of the authors I edited for, anyway, just the act of writing words (black text on a white page) satisfies Lefty because we're actually doing something logical and left-brainy. Leave that bit of writing for a few hours, maybe even a whole day, then read it. Don't nit pick re: punctuation, spelling or grammar, 'cause those are left brained things. I really think you'll be thrilled at how worthy your writing actually is. Every word and phrase that strikes you as good, stop, congratulate yourself and say your version of, "I wrote this. And it's freakin' good." It gives you confidence, and confidence and recognizing that it's just Ol' Lefty butting in, messing up your mojo sends those doubt gremlins into their stinky black hole. I do the free writing thingy before I sit down to my WIP, then just work on my WIP. Lefty seems to stay asleep for me that way. For you too, I hope.

Dan Rhys said:

If it helps, I frequently--even during mundane tasks of the day--ask myself, "What if this happened?" Sometimes the idea goes nowhere while other times it leads to something neat and from which I can build a story. I based an entire novel on my answer to that simple question one day. Instead of trying to think creatively, just give your mind opportunities to do so. When it happens to come up with something great, seize it and run with it. It honestly worked for me.

Click to expand...

Yes! Seems like you might be like me, characters living in my imagination all the time. Kinda fun, I think, to ask the question and dream about all the consequences. Much harder for me to settle on some answers and consequences and get the whole thing onto the page from a character's perspective. For me, that's the real work.

I get writer's freeze every time I need to write a romantic scene.

My desk is cluttered too. Maybe even Hoarders worthy. I just pick anything that sticks out to me. Today I wrote three paras about the only tree in my yard that still has leaves. Ridiculous, really, and def a lot of verbal diarrhea. But so far from anything to do with my WIP, the exercise worked.

Me too. Catholic upbringing, dontcha know. I read really smutty romances for two weeks and checked out how those authors did it. Even after that, I had the freeze up. So I gave myself a smutty pen name and wrote as THAT person. LOL Decided I'd just be bold and let the chips fall where they might. That helped unleash the sexy gods.

Free-writing can really work.

I once free-wrote a short story entirely about and from the POV of the colour white.

It remains one of my better short works, which may say something about the quality of my short work.

But there is always something to write about.

When I first read the thread title, here’s where my mind went:

Is the Writers Union on strike?
is this like some obscure Donner party reference at like a writers conference gone bad...?
Or is this just another term for Writers Block?

Glad it’s #3...

My own tricks are physical exercise, free writing, and just shoving the whole damn thing in the drawer until I find it again.

If you can't be creative, try being derivative.

Think of your favorite stories, in any medium, and change one thing about them. Then write something--a paragraph, a page, a short story, anything--about what that story would be like with that change.

What if Harry Potter were Draco's brother?

What if Sam had carried the ring to Mordor?

What if Luke Skywalker had been born blind?

This is helpful because most of the material is already there for you--all you have to do is think about the implications of your small change. Doing so will warm up your creative "muscles" in a way that might help you get back to writing.

This is all just for practice, of course. Trying to publish derivative work is a bad idea for all sorts of reasons.