Goodreads asked Leigh Matthews:

How do you deal with writer’s block?

Leigh Matthews I'm a bit of a workhorse when it comes to writing projects, but I do have some strategies for when the words aren't flowing and I'm wrangling with some knotty plotting issue in a novel.

I've found it helpful, for instance, to go to a floathouse for some serious sensory deprivation in a flotation tank! Letting all the daily minutiae fall away over 90 minutes in the tank let's my brain relax and unravel plot tangles. I almost always come out of the tank with an answer to whatever was stalling my writing.

If I'm stuck with a completely blank page and just can't get started, perhaps after a hiatus from writing, I like to play around with poetry mash-ups: taking two seemingly very different poets and picking a single poem from each, then picking adjectives and verbs from one, nouns and adverbs from another, and mashing these together in a whole new poem. This can create some amazing metaphors or just odd phrasing that I might never have come up with otherwise. It's also just a good reminder to take inspiration from other writers and get the juices flowing, so to speak.

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