To slow down, unplug, and work on a small hobby or craft. Get some glue, paper, scissors, or whatever. If you draw, knit, crochet, whittle, fold origami, or something else with a little more tact, then go do that.
Forget that you may look like a fool.
Take an hour and feel what it is like to make something; to be a creator. Assign yourself a small goal, don't go overboard, just something that you know should take an hour.
Jesus spent the first ~30 years of his life as a carpenter. He made things. He followed in his Father's footsteps and was a Creator. He wasn't born as a politician, a lawyer, or any other position of authority with titles and pomp. He was a simple carpenter who provided a service to his community to support his family.
Take some time to imagine what things Jesus may have made for his friends and family. Did he raise barns? Make dining tables and chairs? Lathe bowls? Whittle spoons?
Imagine the business he and his father had together. Imagine him laying down after a long day of scrubbing wood off a beam, with the worries of today shortly behind him and the day he would hang on such a beam long off.
Imagine a small child rushing to their parent and handing them a crudely drawn picture of their family. It doesn't matter the drawing is crude, what matters is that the child gave a gift to their parent of their own volition and innocence with no expectation of payment other than a smile and a hug.
God made you capable of doing amazing things. Appreciate all that you can do to follow in the Father's steps as a Creator; to emulate the creative process and know more than you did before you started.
There is no greater way to praise God than that.
Thank you for this. I'd give you a thousand updoots if I could. I was just reading about this very topic last week. We were not meant to spend our entire lives working for "the man" and staring at our screens all day. We are all natural-born creators, made in the image of our own Creator, and we need to create to feel alive and to feel that we are worth something in this world.
I like to write, so I am still stuck to my screen more than I should be, but I also make small crafts. No matter how small it is, it just feels good. The best artists of all time have said that, when they are creating, they are not doing it all alone. A bigger force is working through them. That's why it feels so good, I think, because it connects us to God and our true purpose. Use the talents and interests he gave you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLaBgT3zE-A
I'm not a great fiction writer, but I can tell you that despite it making you look positively insane, acting out the scenes in your mind with action figures or lego mini-figures offers a new perspective.
Most of the time we have characters in our mind, but we just assume they are moving while they talk to one another.
Act out what you've written with the figures and I suspect you'll find the same thing I realized -- that your characters just stand around talking and never interact with the setting. Twilight movies are about 90% just characters standing around, and it's obviously a verbatim adaptation from the books.
Though, it doesn't have to be for the screen.
Small details like how a character pours a beer can speak thousands of words where a single line of "He tilted the glass along with the bottle, careful not to overindulge the crystal with foam."
Compare it to someone handing a glass of half-head, and you'd realize the person pouring doesn't imbibe regularly, otherwise they would have demonstrated far more skill in their aim to get plastered.
Such a line could inform an attempted poisoning or better yet demonstrate the same character panicking in a later scene where they were far more composed earlier in the story. Though they may outwardly be stable, the pouring of the glass could play a critical role in discovering they were the antagonist.
You don't have to flesh out the meaning of these actions, just describe the actions in specific detail. The reader can fill in the gaps, and without even so much as a paragraph of narration, you've written ten pages of dialogue.
Anyway, your comment lighted something in me and I just thought I'd share.
I'm not a great fiction writer either, but I've been working on a novel for a few years and I'm constantly tweaking it. Maybe one day soon, I'll actually get it done. I worked on it today after reading your post.
I watch my story like a movie in my mind when I'm lying in bed at night. I see the actors I'd choose for the characters and play it out like it's on a screen. It's good for practicing visualization, of course.
Anyway, I like the advice you gave here. It's often the little, subtle details in books and movies that make them so memorable, and this is a good reminder. Do you have a favorite writer?