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Mine yourself! It’s an odd phrase. It might even be considered an invitation to masturbate, but it’s far more straightforward. This is Tuesday. The forecast for Thursday is for possible snow showers.

Let’s back up and think about our writing. Many writers fear “writer’s block.” We need a means of overcoming that fear. It feels like we couldn’t even write a grocery list. We know if we can write something, anything, we can overcome writer’s block. There are many suggestions, such as dropping an email to a friend. Mine yourself is another way to fight writer’s block.

Let’s go back to the opening paragraph of this blog and consider the weather forecast for Thursday. Let’s mine it. Do I need to do something to prepare for the snow? I haven’t got the posts with reflectors to mark the driveway for plowing up yet. I really should mow the lawn one more time. The grass is rather tall, and if I don’t cut the grass, there is a chance of a fungus growing on the tall dead grass. That means big brown spots in the spring. My wife tells me we still need to dig the Gladiolus and store them for winter. You could write about doing those things or even write about past events when you did them.

I think back to Halloweens when we could cross-country ski to do our trick-or-treating. I can also think of a Halloween when I went trick-or-treating with my son and one of his friends and almost froze to death while they had the greatest fun. Or another Halloween when I scared them with made-up stories about an old abandoned house. All of the things in this paragraph and the paragraph before are things we could mine from our past. You already know these things, having lived them. Think of how you could think up an interesting small story using these events, mining them.

In other words, “Mine yourself” to get past the perception you have nothing to write about.