If your work requires you to write a lot, there comes a time when you find yourself using the same words and phrases over and over again. The thesaurus becomes your best friend, until it becomes your mortal enemy, tossing up words no one would ever use in real life. So you search and search…and search…until you use your old standbys one more time. Just this once.

I get it. Typing is easy, but writing is hard. It’s tricky to be both clear and interesting at the same time, especially if you’re repeatedly trying to promote something, explain a complex idea, or even just expand your audience. It’s easy to get tired, and it’s even easier to get tired of your own voice. I don’t want to get into blaming SEO for this, but when you’re always keeping your eye on keywords, your vocabulary gets trimmed down, and I’d argue, so do your ideas.

It’s not practical to expect that we can give our minds the break they need by just not writing for a while. The world seems to require us to write more than ever. So how can you do it? Sometimes you have to walk away from the message you know you need to put out there and look at it from a new angle.

You need to turn your project on its head, and one way to do it will take all of ten minutes, tops.

We’ll call it Reverse Mad Libs: Let’s say you’re running a speaking engagement for a popular author followed by a small gathering for donors to your organization. You’re excited for the event, but not the emails. Choose the five most important words that need to be in that message: tickets, parking, entrance, photography, and books. Now write five sentences, each one including one word in your list. Do not write on the topic you’re expected to write about. Write about that great concert you went to; a long, hot trip to Six Flags; an imaginary trip to Iceland. Write your first Sci Fi story in five sentences. Make it about Sasquatch if you want to. Bonus points if you don’t worry about spelling, punctuation or grammar, and even more if you write it by hand.

What does that get you, you ask? Just a break. I’m simply inviting you to play under very controlled circumstances: tight guidelines in a short period of time. Stick to the “rules,” but let it take you out of your current project. Go anywhere. Maybe you find that in those five sentences you stumbled on an adjective that would work perfectly in the project you need to write by the end of the day. Maybe you wrote something that made you laugh. Maybe you just felt less pressed for a few minutes. That’s enough.

Let me make this clear: you know how to write the email/proposal/web page you need to write. I trust that. You do this all the time. What I’m trying to help you with here is to break up the monotony of writing the emails (and captions, and blog posts) you already write well. It helps your sense of humor and it helps your writing.

Let me know how it goes!