 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and I don't know what I want this video to be because as is the case with a lot of my videos, I just tend to write whatever part of my brain happens to leak out of my ears and in this case the brain has dried up and the words are all gone. I have the dreaded writers block and in an outstanding move I've decided that I'm going to use this writers block to destroy the writers block by talking about the most difficult part about being a storyteller, writers block. As always keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion so if you feel like the very fact that I put this video out means that I don't actually have any problems and that I'm just making it all up, feel free to play therapist however you want. But before we begin, ads keep me in business so let's get down to business. 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So writers block is a cutesy little term for when your imagination decides that it no longer vibes with this universe and fades away into nothingness, leaving you staring at a blank page or tablet or backside of a police station thinking, I don't really know what to write here. And in most cases the feeling will go away on its own and it's often a sign of overworking when you find yourself frustrated that your brain is doing the big dumb. So taking some time to yourself could do wonders for you. I personally spend about a half an hour in the shower, alone with my thoughts experiencing nothing but the deafening fall of rain and the sauna of the heat being cranked all the way up and that's when I can find the clearest path to sucker punching my brain into doing its job. Of course my water bill prevents me from spending all of my time in the shower so I spend the rest of my evenings writing stories like this one on my phone while lighting my awkward silence candle and listening to ambient city noises. For me it's finding a calming middle ground for my senses to be stimulated but not overwhelmed. Too much noise and I can't think straight but without any noise at all the depression whispers will creep in. Everybody's different though so it's not like my method will work 100% of the time for you. And you've got to find that happy work zone wherever you can because most people today don't have the luxury of working from home and turning their living room into a zen sanctuary. For instance when I first started doing Dabby Chappy videos I was living with my parents so the house wasn't really a good spot to disassociate in. However I was also working a part-time job at a laser tag place and being in a dark arena with 90s techno music was somehow the optimal spot to get writing done. I would spend hours standing in the blind spots of security cameras and writing up my ranger guide while making sure that 10 year olds weren't pistol whipping each other in real life so it's actually kind of luck that I was able to start doing YouTube in the first place. I don't know if I would have had the same outcome if I worked in a convenience store or something. The point is that some way, somehow you have to find a way to force your environment to give you the time that you need to write because there will always be days when you feel inspired beyond all odds to work on a creative project and we call that feeling motivation otherwise known as a fucking trap. Motivation is a trait that keeps you complacent in life. You feel sudden burst of energy to get things done that last for like a day at most and then you're back to your old habits along with the new feeling that you just need to get back in the groove. But the truth is that's not your groove. It's a lie. If we accept that as humans we have sudden bad days where we get absolutely nothing done and have no energy to do anything but we understand and recognize that those bad days aren't who we are then we also have to accept that when we have sudden good days where we capture all six of the infinity chemicals in our brain that let us get shit done those good days are also not indicative of us. The other days where we're not particularly good or bad those are the days that define who we are and if we judge ourselves based on how we act when we're motivated we're setting ourselves up to be disappointed. If you've been with me for a long time you'll know that I never miss a week to upload a video. Ever. Even if I'm taking a break I'll still upload an update video saying hey nerds no video this week. That's because I've tricked my brain into thinking that the world will end if I miss a single upload. I may be lazy at the beginning of the week but as it gets closer to the clock I start to pick up the pace and some part of me knows that if I didn't keep such a rigid schedule I'd lose the will to keep making videos and my channel would die. It's what I keep telling people who ask me well how do I get into YouTube? Make videos. Don't stop. It took me eight months to get my first thousand subs and that's just under 40 videos. I know that this isn't a how to do YouTube guide but the process is the same for D&D. Whatever it is you're working on you need to find a manageable amount of work to do in a manageable amount of time and then keep doing it forever until it's done. Writing stories, building sets, even making a character can be a chore for some people but you just chip away at it a little bit at a time and if the motivation to work does hit you treat it as a temporary benefit and you don't bum yourself out when it doesn't become the new normal. Now getting the right mentality is great and all but it's only half of the picture. Writers Block can be a symptom of many things and one of the more subtle things can be the media that you're consuming. In my free time I like to write stories. I've been working on a few chapters of a fantasy adventure that may or may not see the light of day but I hit a snag at one point where for the life of me I could not bring myself to write any more of it no matter how hard I tried. I started to work backwards from the point where I hit Writers Block to see if there was something that I had done and I came to realize that in an effort to better understand the nuances of storytelling I had read through all of Saga, an amazing comic book by the way you should read it, as well as having watched all of Bojack Horseman, an amazing TV show by the way you should watch it, which are both very competent stories but the problem is that the story I was trying to write was happy and Bojack Horseman is sad. Because of that everything I was writing for my own story turned into a depressing allegory for life and death and I hated everything and then I stopped. It wasn't until I started binging adventure time that I decided hey maybe life doesn't have to be misery and sarcasm. Maybe it can just allude to misery and sarcasm and that change in the media that I was consuming broke me out of my slump. It also helped that I was pestering all of my friends about my stories and a few of them actually responded so the serotonin was really kicking in by that point. But sometimes the secret to writing is to stop writing. I talked about punting motivation into space and setting up a rigid unbreaking schedule and you should definitely do that but if what you're working on isn't fulfilling enough for you then you need to shift gears. Don't stop writing completely but find a different part of the story or a different character that you like and let your ideas flow into this new thing until you get tired of that. When I write my stories I'm not going from beginning to end. That would be bad. I'm starting at the main parts of the story that matter to me and I'm working my way out like expanding bubbles of information until I can find a way to make those bubbles connect and I keep doing that until I have one giant bubble some people might call a story. It hasn't made me any better at coming up with endings but this is D&D. Your game will be cancelled before it gets there anyway. Overall Writers Block requires a change in circumstances if you want to overcome it. Otherwise you'll just be waiting on that far off hit of motivation that like an ex lover might not even come and won't be satisfying if it does. If worse comes to worse find a friend to collaborate with you. I get my best writing done when I'm in a room with somebody else who shares my good vibes that I can bounce ideas off of and they can give ideas to me that I can then expand upon. Collaborative efforts really make my life a lot easier and a lot of the work that I do is with somebody else even if I don't show it because real life is boring and even though we say oh art needs to be for ourselves a lot of the time we're making it for other people. So sit down, get your writing down and feel free to show it off to all those people who probably won't care. Buuuut that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can, uh, but yeah, Daffy out.