How AI can help push past writer’s block

We’ve all been there: Not knowing what to write about. Call it a lack of inspiration, or analysis paralysis, or just plain boredom with the same ol’ same ol’, writer’s block comes for all of us. There are endless tips and tricks out there for wrangling it, but it can still persist.

Write with Confidence using Editor

Elevate your writing with real-time, intelligent assistance

Learn more

We’ve just begun to scratch the surface of what AI can do to aid us in our creative endeavors, including creative ways we might use it to help us push past the age-old enemy of writer’s everywhere. Here are some things to try when you just can’t bear the taunting of your blinking cursor and blank document anymore.

Have a conversation

Ideas can come from anywhere. How often have you found yourself chatting with someone, only to be struck by inspiration for something you can’t wait to write down?

Enter: Generative predictive text AI.

Being inspired can’t be planned, but a playful (or serious, or whimsical, or substantive) back-and-forth with a chat AI can happen any time you want, for as long as you want. You can even ask your conversation-mate to converse with you as though they were someone of your choosing—a celebrity, a historical figure, a pet, a plant, whatever sparks your interest.

Prompt it for a prompt

Journal writers use prompts often to guide their entries, but prompts can work just as well for other kinds of writing. There are endless lists of prompts out there—you probably have some prompts you use regularly without even realizing it. But sometimes we need the novelty of the unknown to spark the imagination.

So, why not ask a generative predictive text AI to come up with a prompt for you? You might even find that, while crafting your prompt to receive your prompt you’ve prompted yourself to discover a whole new exciting idea.

Start with a picture

There’s a reason they say a picture’s worth 1,000 words. For some writing inspiration, start with a handful of words and an AI image generator. See what images you can conjure, then try writing about whatever in the AI’s output most takes your attention. Here are some questions to answer while writing about your AI’s output:

• What’s happening—or what just happened—or what’s about to happen?
• Where is this happening? What country, planet, building, city is depicted?
• When is this happening? Is this the past, present, future—or an alternate timeline?
• Is the beginning of something or the end?

AI can generate the start of something for you. Something good? That depends on how you prompt it. But it’ll be words on the page, at least, which can go a long way toward busting through a block brought on by the endless possibilities of a clean slate.