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I have discovered the secret to getting yourself in the mood to write, and, surprisingly, it has absolutely nothing to do with magic mushrooms.

I want to make the distinction right away that what we’re discussing here is not writer’s block; we’re discussing how to get motivated to write. If you are already raring to go, but find yourself unable to put words down, I suggest you read my previous post: Captain Trips and the Permanent Cure for Writer’s Block.

OK, let’s get started.

Some of my regular readers may have noticed that I haven’t stuck to my regular schedule of posting at least once per week. For some reason, I just couldn’t get in the mood to write. I’m not exactly sure what my problem was, but my lack of motivation got so bad that I panicked and ordered a book from Amazon called, Write Is a Verb: Sit Down, Start Writing, No Excuses.

The book is written by a fellow named, Bill O’Hanlon, a psychotherapist turned writing coach that, in the book, not only examines the reasons writers put off writing, but also, as indicated on the back cover, helps you to discover “what uniquely motivates you to write.”

The book is filled with information that would help a lot of unmotivated writers, but seriously, as long as your problem is a lack of motivation and not writer’s block, I believe I’ve found the real secret, and you won’t have to buy the book to learn it.

The last time I had a serious bout with “lack of interest in writing” I applied the secret and didn’t even know it. I had signed on to participate in last May’s Bloggers Unite for Human Rights, a joint effort by Bloggers Unite and Amnesty International which encouraged the entire blogosphere to take a day, May 15th, and write a post involving human rights. When I had made the commitment a month-and-a-half earlier, I was full-on motivated to participate in such a worthy cause.

Flash-forward to May 14th, 8:30 pm on the night before the big day: I hadn’t even started writing. In fact, I didn’t even know what I was going to write about. Besides, I’m a humor blogger, how am I supposed to write about the atrocities of human rights violations and make it funny? I considered giving up on it all together.

But, when I commit to do something, I do my best to keep my word. So, I sat down and forced myself to write. By 10:00 pm I was finished and posted the human rights article to my blog. In my opinion it was not my best work–I would’ve liked to have spent more time on it–but at least I fulfilled my commitment and felt good that I contributed to the project.

It turns out that if I had given up on that particular post it would’ve been one of the biggest mistakes of my life. The next morning, I turned on CNN and saw Dead Rooster and my hastily written blog post featured in their story about the Bloggers Unite project. I got some of the best exposure you can get from a post that I almost didn’t write because I couldn’t get in the writing mood.

So, how did I finally get motivated?

The secret, in my opinion, can be summed up in the short quote by Joyce Carol Oats on page 37 of Write is a Verb:

“One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood. …I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing seemed worth enduring for another five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”

Writing creates the mood.

The next time you don’t feel motivated to write, sit down and begin writing anyway. Get your fingers moving and watch what happens. It is almost magical the way it works. In my Bloggers Unite example above, it was the deadline that forced me to start typing; but, it’s not a deadline that gets you in the mood, it’s the activity of writing.

No one ever said it better than Ray Bradbury, “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.”

OK, so this may not be the funniest post I’ve ever written, but you can still help my standings at Humor-Blogs.com by clicking here and voting for it.

Photo credit: gwen

For those of you planning to pull pranks on the ice cream truck driver this summer, here’s a tip: If one of your pranks involves climbing a tree with a well-crafted dummy and hurling it in front of the approaching ice cream truck, it is usually a mistake to set it on fire first.

When I was a kid, my neighborhood had a high turnover rate for ice cream truck drivers. The reason, of course, was that my cousin Steve and I, who lived just one street apart back then, were constantly planning crueler and crueler pranks to play on them. Each new ice cream man quickly learned that when he got close to Steve’s house, he needed to step on the accelerator and speed by as fast as possible thus shortening his time in the “Hot Zone.”

Like most twelve-year-old-boys, we started out with the classic water balloons and dirt clods, and then advanced to more elaborate, sophisticated pranks such as those requiring various types of illegal fireworks.

But, then we got the dummy idea.

There are two proper methods to throwing a dummy out of a tree and into the path of a moving ice cream truck: a.) Face-up-horizontal as if some knucklehead accidentally fell out of the tree to die a horrible screaming death beneath the truck, or b.) Face-down-horizontal as if someone purposely catapulted out of the tree to commit an ice cream truck related fantasy suicide.

We went with “suicide.”

But, first, we had to build the perfect dummy. We started off with old clothes, which we stuffed with other old clothes; then we used one of those white, Styrofoam wig-stands for the head and used sticky double-back tape to attach a Freddy-from-Scooby-Doo Halloween mask for the face. Gloves and shoes completed the form.

One of us, I think it was Steve, thought it would greatly enhance the effect if we saturated Freddy’s upper torso and head with Raging Rocket High-Octane Barbeque Starter Fluid then light it off just before we tossed the dummy out of the tree.

It’s funny how it never occurred to us that this was a bad idea until the exact moment the dummy erupted into flames.

We were sitting in the lower branches of the tree which hung about four-feet above where the roof of the ice cream truck would eventually pass. As the ice cream truck approached, Steve let go of the flaming upper torso leaving me holding the knees pressed against a limb and causing the dummy to swing down to stare directly at the ice cream truck driver.

The plan was for both of us to let go of the dummy at the same time so it would fall just in front of the truck, but I momentarily froze in the wake of the tall flames—hesitating just long enough for the truck to get underneath before I snapped-out-of-it and dropped my half.

I can only imagine what this looked like to the ice cream truck driver: He’s slowly driving along, minding his own business blasting Pop-Goes-the-Weasel from his loud speaker, when the flaming upper torso of a body swings out of a tree upside-down; the friendly smile of Freddy quickly melting and distorting into a rictus grin shouting fire like a blowtorch.

As it turned out, the dummy landed square on top of the ice cream truck, lying on its back with its arms spread out, blazing away. We watched as the truck made its way down the street, turned the corner, and continued on its regular route to deliver treats. The flaming body, now appearing as if the driver placed it up there on purpose, sent a confusing message to those wanting ice cream. I doubt he sold many ice cream bars that day.

We never found out if the burning dummy did any damage to the truck, nor did we ever play another prank on that guy. In fact, if we heard Pop-Goes-the-Weasel, we just went in the house.

Photo credit: Picatostes

Captain Trips is the name given to the fictional super-flu virus in Stephen King’s novel, The Stand. In the novel, this flu, which originated as a biological weapon that got away, is so treacherous that it wipes out nearly the entire world’s population aside from a few thousand people. These people are then forced to choose between “good” and “evil” and the two sides eventually face off in an epic battle to determine which side inherits the earth.

Although Captain Trips has absolutely nothing to do with writers block, I am mentioning it here for two reasons:

1. I am currently in the grip of a violent flu bug that is so devastating that I am wondering if Captain Trips might not be fictional after all.
2. It gives me a near legitimate reason to use the cool words, “Captain Trips” in the title of this post.

Think of this as my way of saying I feel far too horrible today to write anything resembling humor, so I’m going to go with something informative and hope you guys won’t ditch me forever.

As most of you already know, writer’s block is that horrible feeling you get when you try to write but for some unknown reason you just can’t.

I must confess that I, the Dead Rooster Extraordinaire, rarely suffer from any significant form of writer’s block. I used to think I was just lucky, but yesterday I received an email from Gary Bencivenga that opened my eyes to the secret. The truth is, I’m not lucky—it’s just that I’ve been doing something correctly in my approach to writing that a lot of people apparently skip.

While reading Gary’s email newsletter, which is geared toward writing effective direct-response ad copy, I was struck by the following line:

“…‘writer’s block’ is just a symptom of a rather easily cured malady—”LRS,” or Lazy Research Syndrome.”

This is it! This is the secret I’ve always had but couldn’t explain! I have always done a lot of research, even for the stuff that wouldn’t seem to require any at all. For instance, my recent post, The Spastic Dance of the Black Widow Spider Slayer, was based upon events that physically happened to me and therefore should have been a simple matter of writing them down. But, I STILL did research on black widow spiders and golf clubs before I did any writing.

Gary also wrote that John Caples, the legendary copywriter, once advised him to gather seven times more interesting information than he could possibly use.

That might be a little extreme, but I think gathering more information than you think you’ll need is sound advice.

The next time you find yourself in a writer’s block situation, go do some research on the subject you’re attempting to write about and see if you don’t find it much easier to get words on paper when you come back. I’ll bet you do.

Try it out and let me know how it works for you.

Right now, I’m going back to bed and sleeping-off this horrible nightmare of a sickness.