hit those keys

 

6. Dress up or down

 Some days, your words don't seem able to summon much spark. They mope around,"like jellyfish with the misery".

Well, give them a treat. Dress those words up, or down. Take them out on the town, or take them slumming.

By that I mean alter your level of diction—word choice and tone—so that it's completely unlike whatever genre of work you're attempting.

• Do you have a monosyllabic, tough-talking, film-noir sort of narrator? Make him write the purplest prose you can contrive. Have him take a long look at that sunset—up until now, he has only seen miserly slices of it, through those grotty Venetian blinds in his grotty office. Let's hear him get voluble. Let's hear him wax poetic.
  
  
• Likewise if you have a very pastoral, discursive and mellifluous flow of words going—something on "the rapture of time," perhaps—break it up. Spatter it with short, terse, bursts of words. Make something inappropriate occur. Have fun with the incongruity of what you make happen on the page.

You probably won't keep these passages—although you never know—but you will entertain yourself. And it does wonders for the misery.