How to Overcome Writer’s Block

(4-minute read)

If you’re someone who writes, whether for work or for play, you probably know what it’s like to look at a blank page and feel stuck. I sure do! I often see the end result but struggle to move towards it. From this stuckness, I flail around for something to explain my futility and – all too conveniently – find writer’s block.

In previous blog posts, we’ve touched on the tortured artist and the doomed magic of the creative. Well, writer’s block goes right alongside such concepts because it too is bullshit. It’s an idea reliant on the myth that writing is a skill bestowed only upon the unlucky few who are condemned to be prisoners of their own slippery creativity.

Eliza McLamb says it best: “The process of writing — not writing well, just writing in general — is so obscenely easy that, to save ourselves embarrassment, we assign blame to some undefined, mystical force. […] God help me, some immovable object has come to stand in between me and my unstoppable force of creative genius. If only this hulking disgrace could move out of the way, then I could easily access my greatest ideas, which flow to me like a constant river of divine inspiration.”

Jeez, I feel called out.

Happily, we are not prisoners. Writing is a skill like any other; it takes practice, time, and effort. It’s not always easy, but that doesn't make it a torturous calling.

I reckon the whimsical boundlessness of writer’s block is what paints its apparent immovability. It’s easy to find a scapegoat in an enigma — just look at how often sci-fi novels rely on black holes to tie up plotlines. But writer’s block can be pulled apart far more easily than a black hole can. It can usually be more accurately described as one (or a combo) of the following:

😓 Self-doubt

🦥 A lack of motivation

🤪 Prioritising other stuff

📱 Being distracted

🤧 Illness

🤭 A lack of preparation

😶‍🌫️ Overwhelm

🥱 Boredom

🪿 Straight-up procrastination.

Which is it for you?

By narrowing your big blue-sky feelings down and scrutinising your stuckness a little more carefully, we can identify a more tangible explanation as to why you’re not getting your writing done (I know, I know, not getting your writing done doesn’t sound nearly as poetic as writer’s block, but in order to move past the denial stage, we gotta call a spade a spade here).

In removing the mystery and identifying our blocks, we're much more likely to overcome them. During this process, we find that, more often than not, the solution is the same: WRITE!