Yes, I did. I wrote every day up until I was ill and my illness sapped my over strength. It made life in general hard. I lost my focus. The characters stopped talking to me. The scenes stopped flowing. As I look back, I realize that even back then I should have wrote, maybe not on the stories I had at the time, but just wrote. Kept a journal, wrote down story or character ideas...anything to keep a flow going.
My advice to anyone suffering with "Writer's Block" is not to try and force your way through whatever it is you are focused on. Keep touching on it regularly YES! But instead of trying to get inspiration out of the thing causing you problems, work on several smaller things. Even if you don't complete them, put them in a folder, (digital or real) and when the spark does return, you will have a treasure chest of new ideas to work on in the future.
Don't stop writing.
Don't let life interfere with your ability to imagine. Keep imagining and putting as much of it on paper, or digitally as you can, when you.
As you get older, you will look back and laugh, cry, remember and imagine more.
My inspiration was a combination of a teacher and therapist.
I was abused as a child, almost any form of abuse you can think of I had some. When my mother divorced her second husband, the father of my little brother and sister, I was sent to therapy.
During that time, nearly at the same time, a teacher and the therapist gave me the same advice. Start writing.
It didn't have to be real, just real enough to get the pain out. Because two people told me to do it and my grandmother agreed with them, it was enough for me to do just that from then on.
My grandmother was my rock, her idea of punishment was so different from my mother, stepfathers' and her boyfriends' that I accepted it with only a bit of whining. My grandmother's punishment was to go either to the dictionary or the set of encyclopedias and do a set number of words or research out of them. I grew to actually love doing it so it lost the punishment power...
I still love to research all these decades and years later. She started doing that in the late 1970s...So over 45 years.
Remember to take breaks, even if it is to stand and stretch. If you drink caffeine alternate your drinks between a caffeinated one, water and something with low or no caffeine. I drink soda pop, water and Fizzy (Thanks SodaStream) assorted other drinks.
Even during contests, camps and contests I make sure to take hours if not days of personal days rejuvenate. My other half and me. have a set date night, in which NO WORK is done, even the 'Honey Does' are ignored.
Taking walks or a restful drive are also great ideas.
