You’ll be full of Big Ideas during the first week of your blogging career. Sooner or later, though, you’ll run into your worst nightmare: writer’s block. No worries. It’s actually pretty easy to fix. Here are three tips to help you get rid of writer’s block.

Who do you think you are?

Be the Queen of England

Pretend to write like somebody else. Just start typing as the Queen of England, Darth Vader, or Mandy Patinkin. You’ll find yourself having fun and maybe even cracking up. You’ll also find that the ideas have started to flow out from your brain and onto your paper (well, computer screen). When you are done, what you’ve written will sound more like you than Her Royal Majesty or Inigo Montoya.

Write fake prescriptions

Should I really have written fake prescriptions?

Write something else — anything else. For the moment, forget about what you have to write. Instead, write an email that you’ve been meaning to send, write a note to your kids’ teacher, write a Christmas card, write whatever. Just writing something will help you formulate ideas and loosen up your writer’s block. As a bonus, you’ll have done something productive, too.

Give up

Putting down the pen or walking away from the keyboard can work wonders. Go wash dishes, pull a few weeds in the yard or play with your dog. In 15 minutes, your mind will free itself and gift you with the most amazing ideas. It just didn’t want to be told what to do.

Read your girlfriend’s diary

Uh-oh

Read somebody else’s writing. Just looking at writing and noting its sentence structure, its word choices, and its overall form will often give you an idea to emulate or improve on. When you start writing, you might find that you’re copying somebody else’s style. Don’t worry about that; let it flow. You can clean up your unoriginality in the edit, while you wonder why you girlfriend did that.

Make somebody write for you

Sometimes drastic times call for drastic measures! Hire a ghost writer.

The most important thing to remember is to relax. Ideas will come. It’s doubtful that anybody has ever had chronic writer’s block but if there is somebody, they are probably horrible people who never walked their dog, and that’s not you.