Arjun Khemani

Whether you’re a writer or even if you’ve ever considered writing an essay or a novel sometime in your life, you may be well acquainted with the “blinking cursor” syndrome. The phase where you just sit in front of the screen and watch the cursor blink every second, without doing anything, and you think your brain has frozen or something and you can’t think about anything to write.

Well, this is what happened with me today. After writing an article a day for just 13 days on this blog, I didn’t have the slightest clue on what to write about today. “Blinking cursor…” was the last resort. This happens fairly often to many people, I believe, not just when writing, but everywhere—in the music and composing sector, creating art, scientists, an entrepreneur with the mindset needed to succeed but with no original idea at hand. At some point in our lives, we all hit the blinking cursor where we have no idea what to do, and just sit static and let inertia pass time.

This made me think quite a bit about creativity (inventing, originating, inspiring, launching or simply creating… anything) and I concluded that creativity is not just a moment or an incident. Creativity is a process. It’s always happening. And with all things, you have ups and downs in it too. The important thing is to just start writing. Start typing. Pick up the brush and start painting. Pick up the guitar and start playing. Pick up the pen and start writing any ideas.

It’s hard, of course. But it’s simple to understand. Stay committed and consistent with your task and practice deliberately. Try opening up your knowledge. Learn new things and adopt new ideas and put them into your work. Let’s all stop staring at the blinking cursor of our lives and do something about it. If you don’t think you can create, then document. Record and document your interesting life, if you can’t think of anything new. Your life can take the form of a story, an article, a painting, a business, anything you make it into. Document, don’t create.

This article started with a blinking cursor. But it ends with a finished blog post. I hope this article brought you some ideas on removing the blinking cursor out of your way.