One great home-based business idea for parents with small children is writing. There are so many different things that you can do as a writer, from blogs to books and so much in between. Home-based writers can work their magic any time, any where. With a writing business you can take on precisely the amount of projects that you are able to accommodate at any given time. What’s more, you do not need much in the way of startup capital to get going. Since writing is such a popular home-based business for many working parents, I thought that it would be useful to share a couple of tips for overcoming the writer’s worst enemy – writer’s block.
Every writer will likely encounter writer’s block at some time or another, it just comes with the territory. Since every minute of “work time” counts when you are combining working from home with taking care of your children, it is useful to have a list of go-to strategies at your fingertips for those times when it’s time to work but you just can not find the words. One very useful strategy is to mix it up. If you are working on a few different projects at once and you sit down to work on one of them and it is not happening, switch to another if your deadlines permit. Instead of obsessing about not being able to write what you sat down to write, you may be able to get the words flowing on a different subject or type of writing work and make the most of the time that you have available to you.
Another strategy that is good for people that write frequently in a given subject area (like bloggers) is to take a few minutes and read through some of the posts that you read last week, last month, or even a longer time ago. You might find that there are ideas on those posts that you would like to explore more deeply. Write them down, and you will have a list of ideas that are ready to be turned into posts of their own. This is a great strategy because it can help to clear your current case of writer’s block as well as preventing future instances of writer’s block.
A third strategy that may not help you get your work done now but is useful in that it removes you from your desk where you sit berating yourself for not being able to write. Simply acknowledge the writer’s block, get up, and go do something else. It is hard to justify not working when you only have specific times that you are able to do it, but you may not need to “waste” your entire block of work time to become unblocked. Sometimes all it takes is a few minutes with a cup of tea and a book or magazine, a phone call to a friend or family member, or washing a sink full of dishes to get you ready to write again. The next time that you get writer’s block, remember these strategies and remember that you are not alone – it happens to all of us.
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