Don't worry, you're not alone if you've experienced a blogging malaise. Creative people have been developing strategies for overcoming the blocks, dead ends and barriers that hinder great work for centuries.
One of the most famous was developed in the 1970s by musician and record producer Brian Eno: A deck of cards named Oblique Strategies: Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas.
Oblique Strategies is a deck of cards, each card containing a piece of advice, an aphorism or question designed to jolt the user into approaching the problem from a different angle, including:- Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
- Put in earplugs.
- Retrace your steps.
- Do nothing for as long as possible.
- Ask people to work against their better judgment
The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you're in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that's going to yield the best results. Of course, that often isn't the case - it's just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, "Don't forget that you could adopt *this* attitude," or "Don't forget you could adopt *that* attitude."
Consulting Eno's Oblique Strategies may not work for you, but perhaps developing your own way of introducing random elements into your blogging process could help you to achieve better results. Or perhaps simply wearing earplugs while you blog will be enough...
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