When we’re dealing with writer’s block, whatever the cause, we need to start by being gentle with ourselves. List exercises and specific description are two of the gentlest ways to get our pens moving and start finding our way back to the place of ideas. They’re also both perennially useful for writing, even when we’re going great guns: lists help us cast a wider net for ideas, without pre-judging them; and we always benefit from practising description, as it’s the writing skill we use least in the rest of life.
As an added bonus, given the heatwave, this is themed around water. Writing is a joy – or at least, it’s meant to be. It’s our play space, our escape into secret worlds, and if what we need is somewhere cool and watery, we get to make that up!
So find your notebook and pen, settle yourself somewhere cool with an iced jug of something (southern hemisphere people: feel free to substitute appropriately for your current weather!), and give yourself the gift of ten minutes’ writing. Or longer, if you want: this is your world.
Part One: Lists of Watery Places
Either give yourself 5–10 minutes for this (five if you want to keep the whole thing a ten-minuter) or write the numbers 1–20 down the side of a page. Some people prefer a time limit; some people find time limits stress them out and prefer a quota. You choose whatever suits you best. Then write a list of watery places. For example:
- the sea
- rock pools on the Garden Coast
- a cave with dripping water
- that cave we visited in Greece with a lake and a boat
- the weir by the canal
You can be as general of as specific as you like. Don’t worry about whether ideas are "good enough" or not: the joy of a list exercise is that you put down a bunch of ideas, so they don’t all need to be good. A lot of them end up being part of our thinking – eg in my example, "the sea" was what reminded me of those specific rock pools, and caves in general reminded me of a specific cave. Everything you think of goes down on the list.
Part Two: The Sound of Water and Watery Words
Now you’ve got your list, spend the rest of the time (five minutes to keep the whole thing a ten-minuter) listening to and describing the sound of water. Adding sounds always makes a story or poem much more immersive, and water is one of those things we have heaps of onomatopoeia for – ie words that sound like the actual sound, like "glug", "slosh", and "trickle". Plus water tends to be pretty ubiquitous anywhere humans settle or hang around, so having water-words in your sound repertoire is always handy!
For listening, I highly recommend MyNoise.Net: very high quality soundscapes, professionally recorded and very lovingly put together by Dr Stefane Pigeon. He’s got heaps of watery soundscapes, so use your list as inspiration for what kind of water you’d like. (I’ve been listening to Icelandic Shores all week.) Once you’ve clicked on your water soundscape, do check out the presets below it as well, to play with, and the slider animation button which varies the sound as you listen.
While you listen, describe the water. You can write full sentences or simply brainstorm words, whichever you prefer. If you want more words, look at Reverse Dictionary’s sound-of-water words for extra inspiration.
That’s it! Your list’s given you more ideas of story locations, where interesting things might happen, and you’ve expanded your description repertoire to include the often-underused sense of sound. And you’ve spent ten minutes writing. Hurrah! (How’s that jug looking? Need a top-up?)
If you’re enjoying yourself, though, and want to take it futher, I have a couple of serving suggestions for you:
Optional: Moving through the watery place
To play with this futher, add someone moving through the watery place: a character through whom we’ll get all the lovely description. With all your water words, as much as possible, you want to use them as nouns (thing words) and verbs (doing words) not describing words or ___ing words: that keeps the writing lively and active. So if I braintormed "sloshing" and "glugging", I can say "The waves sloshed over the sand and glugged between the rocks".
- If you’re using this as a starting point, I suggest you write a descriptive passage / poem about exploring your watery place and moving around it: that’ll give you plenty of variety of water-sounds to describe. And have another look at those presets in MyNoise: they’ll give you a sense of moving around as the sounds change.
- If you want to use this with your own story, I suggest you pick the places where water sounds could be prominent, and then write a passage of description for each one. You might not use that passage as-is straight in the story: you’re sharpening your awareness of what the water sounds are, and expanding your repertoire of water-words by using them. Though some snippets might go straight in!
Have fun!
If you want to explore more ways to get from writer’s block back into your joy of writing, and ways to unpick what's causing it, the Past Writer’s Block workshop is running on Saturday 15 August 2026, in Oxford. In a fun, friendly, supportive atmosphere, you’ll identify the obstacles that keep you from the joy of writing and find ways to move past them. Read more about the workshop and book your place here.
