Are You Stuck Writing Your Book? Try This!

Are you stuck writing your book? You know how sometimes you can’t seem to get the content of your book out? You’re stuck, and can’t seem to write anything? Or perhaps you think your content sucks and it just seems like you’re banging your head against the wall.

I think it’s fair to say that all the authors I’ve dealt with have faced similar problems. Some authors resort to brute force and work on a problem doggedly for days. But sometimes this isn’t the best solution.

So what do you do? How do you resolve this?

Use Sleep To Resolve Your Problem

Well, what I do now is sleep on it. And when you do this, you’re engaging the best problem-solver you possess. Allow me to explain.

While cognitive psychologists may debate how this works, it seems that during sleep, our brain processes the experiences of the day and categorises them for us. In effect, it’s doing some learning for us. It makes connections between things that we were not consciously aware of.

And, incidentally, it focuses on things that involve emotions. Because things that evoke emotions like fear, anger, frustration or love are obviously important to us. They highlight issues that need our attention.

So if you have a problem, you can set your unconscious mind to work on it while you sleep. That’s what it does — it will solve problems for you. That is if you let it — and to do this you just have to direct it in the right way.

You see, your unconscious mind is very powerful, but to get it to work for you it has to be given a direction. If you have a problem — in our case being stuck writing our book — you can set your unconscious to work on it and it will come up with a solution.

Here’s How To Use It

Before you lie down to go to sleep, define the problem you have as specifically as you can. Then just go to sleep. You may well find that you have a solution to your problem when you wake in the morning.

It’s that simple.

Want to make this even more effective and fun? Let me tell you about a unique problem-solving tool.

Lovely Problem Solving Tool

Several years back I came across this lovely problem-solving tool. It involves using ‘Guatemalan Worry People’. Guatemalan Worry People are little dolls made of wire or wood, wrapped in cotton or wool. Mine came in a little fabric bag which contains six worry people, all dressed differently. They are available in different sizes, but my people are about 1cm tall.

How Do They Work?

Guatemalan worry people will take the worrying responsibility from you, allowing you to have a good night’s sleep. They will take care of your problems, and they can give you solutions. But there are rules about their successful use.

Rules For Guatemalan Worry People

Each worry person can only deal with one problem per night. That’s only fair, isn’t it?

And to deal with your problem, you have to explain it to the doll very precisely. The more specific you are, the more likelihood there is of getting a solution. It helps if you’re concise, too.

Once you’ve explained your problem to your worry person, you pop the person in the little bag and place the bag under your pillow. And then you go to sleep.

I have six worry people in my set. So clearly, collectively they can only deal with six problems per night — one each. If you have more problems than that, the worry people have to deal with the other problems another night. You can have the same worry person deal with a different problem on a subsequent night.

Why Does This Approach Work?

It forces you to define a problem very specifically, in the way you’d explain it so as a stranger could understand it. Once you’ve defined your problem, you sleep and let the power of your unconscious mind work on it.

It may sound silly — perhaps even childish — going through these steps. But the process is highly engaging, and our unconscious works in imagery and metaphor. It also values uniqueness — so if you haven’t used worry people before, then I highly recommend you try them out.

Get a Set And Experiment!

You can get a set from Amazon. They’re inexpensive. So why not order a set now and the next time you’re stuck writing your book, have fun solving your writing problems with Guatemalan worry people!

Who knows, you might find yourself using them on other problems in your work and life!