Help!

OK - when we're back and at full steam again we'll give you inspiration points every other day to get you going. In the meantime here's an idea: 'all at sea' See what the phrase does for you, what does it suggest? Think for five minutes and then go - just start writing and let if flow. Stop after 30 minutes. You'll have a load of stuff down. Refine it, muck about a little with it taking particular care over the opening and the closing and then post it up. Good Luck!

it's a radical solution but you could work less ... then you would have more thinking time ... a while ago i was working full time and now i am officially doing two days a week ... this means i have three other days a week to worry so much about my dire financial situation that i cant possibly write ... it wasnt how it was meant to work and is no help at all to you ... ahem ... sorry

Don't give up your job to become a puppet salesman whatever you do (what! Never crossed your mind?)... no time for anyone let alone myself these days... and poorer for it.

You may be doing a job that drains you too much mentally for you to be able to write. You could consider changing to a job that gives you more mental space - something more physical, maybe. The trouble is that creative people often take creative jobs or jobs that they pervert into creativity - and then find their creativity is draining into their job instead of their work. The "sonnet" thread sent me back to reread Tony White's story "Poet", in which the poet, trapped in a full-time job and planning on writing a sonnet an evening, thinks more about his poetry than actually writing it. "It's a shame, he thinks, that reports aren't recognised as a literary genre. Not yet. Though they are, obviously. Each one as precision-crafted as a Bartheelme short stoy. But reports have a limited audience. Not to mention time-scale. They offer nothing to the reader of the future no matter how good thy are. And his are very good. He treats each bullet point like a haiku. Writes them in haiku form, sometimes, for a laugh. It has been known. And why not? A bit of exercise for the old grey matter. No one notices, obviously. They'll look again when his sonnets are collected by Faber and Faber." d.beswetherick.

Ooh. I wonder if I can write c code in haiku form...

I found that working full time meant I wrote far more than bumming around as a lazy student. The fear of giving up on writing spurred me on to pen shedloads. I think Tony's on the right track with the inspiration point thing. If you take a different random phrase each day and set yourself ten or twenty minutes to write solidly on it, without much worrying about quality of content, you'll find it comes naturally. And, by virtue of the fact you'll be writing every day, you'll be a writer.