Dealing with Writer’s Block, Tip 1: Identify the Causes

To deal with and reduce or eliminate writing blocks, an important first step is to identify the causes of the block.  Until that has been accomplished, it’s difficult to make any plans for change.

I’m going to focus on writing blocks related to fears, doubts, and anxieties. In my experience, writing blocks spring from two main sources: those that spring from fears and anxieties and those that spring from dislike (or even hatred) of the project (See note on writing blocks, below).  Of course fears and anxieties can lead to hatred, and hatred can lead to fears and anxieties, so these two sorts of writing blocks are not entirely independent of each other. But to the extent that a writing block springs from dislike or disinterest in the project (and that dislike or disinterest does not have root causes in any fear, doubt, or anxiety), I don’t have much to say about it, beyond “choose to do it, or choose to walk away.”  I can’t think of any exercises or practice that would make someone interested in work that they hate.

But for writing blocks that have roots in fears, doubts, and anxieties, the writing blocks can be lessened or entirely removed through the development of a good practice and the use of writing exercises.

Exercise and Healthy Practice

In the long run, success as a writer comes from a regular practice of writing. By and large, people who publish regularly are people who work at writing on a regular basis.  Therefore, if you want to write, you should be thinking about how to build a regular practice of writing.  There are regular practices that are built on negative emotions, and this kind of practice—a merciless “try harder or you’ll never be good enough” mindset—can lead to growing emotional barriers. If you push yourself to suffer through a task, it would hardly be surprising if you developed anxieties around that task. 

My basic approach to reducing or eliminating writing blocks sits in the context of building a healthy practice motivated by positive ideals. As you develop a healthy practice, many anxieties and fears can fall away, reducing emotional barriers, even if some anxieties may remain.

Central in developing a healthy writing practice that reduces anxiety is to engage in writing exercises. The crucial factor of a writing exercise is that it is viewed as a trial aimed at building skill, not a final product for presentation. In such exercises, early errors are expected as part of the process of improvement. The concern is for going through the process.  A writing exercise can be viewed as a parallel to a musician playing scales: the scales are not practiced for their own sake, but to help build skill that can be applied to later performances.

To some extent, the key here is shifting focus from product to practice: rather than creating a good written work, create a good writer. In the long run, a good writer will be able to create many good written works. In this context any time you write anything—lists, emails, texts, journal entries, as well as more formal pieces of writing—you’re practicing the general skill of writing, which is to find words to express some idea or information. 

Writing exercises, like the musician’s scales, are a private practice, and being private, it’s not necessary to be concerned with what other people would think of what you write.

Exercise 1: Identify Your Fears, Doubts, and Anxieties

If you are struggling with any sort of anxiety barrier to writing, one very useful writing exercise is to try to identify all the different fears, doubts, and anxieties.  Make a list of all the anxieties, doubts, and fears that you have related to your writing.  Be as detailed as possible. A good list of anxieties provides a starting place for a process of identifying specific concerns that can be addressed in some way. Some writing-related fears are real and can’t simply be dismissed—“It’ll get rejected,” is a very real possibility to acknowledge. Other fears are less accurate—“writing sucks; it’s torture,” isn’t accurate for all writers and is, in a way, a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you tell yourself writing will be painful, you may never develop a non-painful practice.  For many writers, fears of criticism by people from their past trigger anxiety, but making these fears explicit reveals that they can be dismissed as past concerns, not present ones.

In the exercise of writing about your writing-related concerns, not only do you practice your ability to turn ideas into words on the page, but you also gain insight into your process of writing, and that insight can be used to refine and improve your practice.

A word of caution and care: An exercise of writing about anxieties can trigger anxiety, so be gentle with yourself. Spend a few minutes writing down different anxieties, doubts, or fears as a starting point.  Repeat the exercise often, but not so often that it triggers anxieties. Practice identifying your concerns.

In future work, you can focus on specific individual concerns to seek ways to eliminate or otherwise manage/reduce that concern. (I anticipate writing some future posts on dealing with specific concerns/anxieties that many writers experience.) 

Diagnosis is the first step to treatment

If you are struggling with writer’s block—if you’ve written in the past, but are getting stuck now due to anxiety that arises in the writing practice—a first step is to identify the causes of difficulty.  Many anxieties about writing can be eliminated in the process of developing a healthful, productive, and sometimes enjoyable writing practice, but only if those anxieties can be identified and addressed. Writing is always going to demand effort, and will always offer some chance of failure, so it’s never completely free of emotional challenges, but you can develop a healthy practice in part by identifying and then eliminating or reducing the unnecessary concerns.

Note on writing blocks: failure to write does not always count as a writing block. One can only have “writer’s block” if one (a) is generally responsible and self-disciplined, (b) dedicates time to trying to write, and (c) has had some success as a writer in the past.  The second condition speaks to the notion that you must already have learned to write—as demonstrated by having written successfully in the past (as a student in school, at least)–before it’s reasonable to worry about writer’s blocks. There are many things that impede writing that I would not count as writing blocks. Severe illness or injury that prevent writing are not writer’s block. Inability to schedule time to write, whether due to competing responsibilities or to laziness, is not a writer’s block.

Writing and Writing anxiety: What is writer’s block? Does it even exist?

Most advice for writers relies on the idea that one must be disciplined, keep a writing schedule, and really write when scheduled to write.  That’s all good advice. However, with respect to that advice, there is a question that many ask: what about writer’s block?  Many books on writing basically argue that “writer’s block” does not exist, and that writers just need to be self-disciplined.  This perspective does not, to me, seem useful: it doesn’t address the concerns of people who feel that they are facing some sort of writer’s block, and we would not have a familiar term like “writer’s block,” unless people had some experience that led them to use that term. 

There may be some truth that anyone who claims to be suffering writer’s block just needs to be more self-disciplined. But there’s also some truth in saying that an injured runner could finish the race if they only had more self-discipline: it’s possible to run through some injuries at the cost of exacerbating the injury. Instead of dismissing people who say they suffer from writer’s block, it is possible to examine the causes of their struggles and to work to eliminate any barriers to their writing successfully. The place to start is to inquire about why people say they experience writer’s block.

Writer’s Block isn’t a simple pathology

“Writer’s block” does not exist in the same sense that COVID-19 exists. There is no single identifiable external pathogen that creates writer’s block.  Perhaps, if we want to split hairs, we can argue that writer’s block doesn’t exist because we can’t identify that single specific pathology. But, if we listen to actual writers who are struggling with their projects, it makes sense to consider the idea of writer’s block because the term makes sense to many struggling writers.  There are people who are very self-disciplined but who still struggle to write, and it seems a little facile to say, “well, no matter how much self-discipline you show in the rest of your life, it you’re not writing, you need more self-discipline.”  

Saying “writer’s block” doesn’t exist is a little like saying depression doesn’t exist: there is no single simple pathology to encompass all the different forms of depression, but we accept the existence of depression because we can observe patterns of behavior that fit the rubric of depression, even if the causes of that behavior are varied. Writer’s block deserves similar consideration: we can observe a pattern of behavior whose causes may be varied.

Writer’s Block is a description of certain behaviors

If writer’s block is not a specific pathology, what is it? I think it useful and appropriate to think of “writer’s block” as a way to describe the experience of some writers who are struggling to write for any of a number of reasons related to emotional difficulties like depression or anxiety.  It is specifically appropriate in the context of writers who have clearly demonstrated that they are competent and self-disciplined in their lives as a whole, but who struggle to manifest that competence and diligence in their writing practice. It is especially useful when thinking about writers who have produced written work in the past but are now stuck on a current project. For scholars, it is often an early-career issue centered on either the doctoral dissertation or early work for publication. Doctoral candidates and early-career scholars have typically demonstrated ability and self-discipline for years, showing the ability to manage many responsibilities (teaching, research, administrative duties, etc.) including writing assignments. Such people often demonstrate self-discipline in non-scholarly dimensions of life, too, as athletes, family members, business people, and/or in political or community activism and organizing. In such cases, it seems relevant to ask why their general self-discipline fails in the specific case of writing.

We wouldn’t want to talk about “writer’s block” when referring to someone who doesn’t have self-discipline or to someone who isn’t making any effort to write.  But if we are talking about people who do invest effort into writing, and who do demonstrate significant self-discipline in their lives, then it makes sense to talk about “writer’s block” as something that self-disciplined people experience when they try to write that interferes with writing.

Writer’s block comes from negative emotions

From my personal experience struggling to write, as well as my experience working as a writing coach to help others to write, I would say that “writer’s block” is a way to generally describe more specific emotional responses to writing, like anxiety or depression, that interfere with the clarity of thought and imagination that writing needs. People who have “writer’s block” often have lots of emotional issues specifically related to writing due to the contexts in which they learned to write.

When fear and depression impact the brain, they inhibit operation of the higher cortical areas where reasoning and imagination take place.  This neurological reality suggests that emotional struggles to write cannot simply be reduced to “you’re not trying hard enough; you’re lazy.”  If the issue was simply lack of effort, then with the application of effort, all other problems would fall away. But if the problem is related to emotions that inhibit the higher brain functions, then it is quite reasonable to assume that people who can speak about their ideas and research effectively when they feel comfortable, might also struggle when trying to write about those ideas because of anxieties and doubts about writing.

Reducing emotional blocks

If I had a cure for depression or anxiety, I wouldn’t be writing this; I’d be making millions (or billions) helping people get rid of depression and anxiety.  But I do have a treatment for writing blocks that is more than just “try harder; be self-disciplined,” and it does involve reducing writing-related depression or anxiety.  Generally speaking, the treatment is to develop a healthier writing practice.

Writing need not be an agonizing experience; it can even be enjoyable. With a healthy practice, it is possible to reduce or eliminate many writing-related anxieties, and even to feel some sense of exhilaration as a writer.  A first step in the process is to identify the various emotional barriers to writing that might be experienced.  

There are lots of reasons that people hate writing that have more to do with the context in which they learned to write than with writing itself. Indeed, a given individual might have many reasons that they dislike or fear writing. The very idea that writing is unpleasant—not an uncommon idea—is largely just the zoomed-out description of an experience that would, under a magnifying glass, reveal many smaller, more specific discomforts that combine into a general emotional malaise that impacts all aspects of writing.

Identifying specific emotional issues

Part of developing a healthy writing practice is to identify the various concerns that impact the writing process and to try to reduce or eliminate those concerns as much as possible.  If you think that writing, generally, is unpleasant, you can start by exploring what specific aspects of writing are unpleasant. For many, the fear of being criticized is a big part of the problem. So, too, is the fear of being incapable of the work. There are, it hardly need be said, those who have physical problems that make writing physically painful.

Whatever the specific causes of writing discomfort, the better they are identified, the easier it is to see that writing itself is not necessarily painful, and can actually be a positive experience.  It seems undeniable that some people enjoy writing—if you know such a person, you may resent them and think them a little crazy, perhaps. Regardless, writing can be an enjoyable and rewarding process in the same way that many skilled activities, like music, art, and athletics, can be enjoyable: there are attendant difficulties and frustrations, but the activity is worth the effort and is generally positive.

Writing past anxiety

Specific anxieties can be addressed and reduced to the point that they no longer block the application of self-discipline.  It may not be possible to completely eliminate writing anxieties: doubts about the outcome of your efforts are reasonable.  But if those anxieties can be reduced even a little, it is often enough to get moving again. If you are generally self-disciplined, and only have trouble applying that discipline to your writing, it’s often the case that the self-discipline that serves in other contexts will be enough if the emotional barriers to writing are reduced by even a small amount: once your anxiety is a little lower, your self-discipline might be enough to get you over the emotional threshold and into a habit of writing more productively.

Work on One (Little) Thing at a Time

I have previously written about Henry Miller’s dictum to work on one thing at a time until finished, but it’s a subject and idea that is important to me, so I’m coming back to it, from a slightly different angle, even if I have discussed the same ideas before.

Personally, I have a lot of things to write: I have correspondence with various individuals, both personal and professional; I have blog posts; I have new books to follow the one I’m just finishing (available for pre-order already!). And, in addition to these projects on which I have already started investing effort, there are lots of ideas I have that might become something, but they’re just ideas for the moment, not yet risen to the level of “project.” 

There are times when ideas come to me clearly as coherent pieces that could be captured in an essay.  These times, however, are rarely when I sit down to write.  When I go running, in particular, I often have ideas for writing, and often compose writing in my head.  The idea and the expression seem clear in my head when I’m running.  But when I return and sit down to write, that clarity is lost.

Indeed, one of the more frustrating experiences of being a writer is that the ideas come at times when it’s inconvenient to write them down, and then when there is time to write, I get stuck.  This is not so uncommon. I have worked with many writers who have plenty to say but are still struggling to write. 

My best response to this is to pick one small thing to focus on, and to work on that one small thing.  That way, I get away from being overwhelmed by all the things that I could say and just focus on one single thing.  This focus helps avoid the distraction and confusion of trying to say everything that needs to be said.  It’s hard to say several things at once. It’s hard enough, really, to say one thing at once, if you want to say it well.

If I choose to focus on something small, and on something relatively easy, it makes it easier to overcome emotional barriers to writing—my fears that I will write poorly, that my writing will be ill-received, etc.  A focus on something small and easy (or at least easier) allows engagement with less at stake.

When I think about focusing on something small, I often think about an anecdote related in Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which he relates his experience as a writing teacher with one particular student who was having trouble writing.  The problem started with a student who wanted to write about the United States. Sensing this was too much, he suggests just writing about Bozeman, Montana, the specific town in which the university was situated. The student failed in this, writing nothing. To help, he reduced the scope of the project, suggesting the student write about one street in the town. Still, the student remained stuck and unable to write.  The anecdote recalls how, in frustration, the teacher suggests writing about one specific building on the street, and even goes so far as to suggest starting with one specific brick in the facade. This insight came at least partly from his recognizing that he himself had had problems related to having too much to say. (“A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say.” [pagination changes in different editions, so I won’t give page numbers. The passage from which I quote here and in the next paragraph is right near the beginning of part III — maybe 15 or so paragraphs in.])

Interestingly, he goes on to explain the problem as being a problem of trying to repeat other people, which seems like a different issue (“…the narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious that she had to do some original and direct seeing”). I don’t see how he made that logical leap. As I see it, getting stuck because you have too many things to say is distinct from getting stuck because you’re trying to repeat others rather than expressing yourself.  Yes, one dimension of getting stuck when trying to repeat others is the choice of what to repeat, which is a flavor of having too many things to say, but repeating others is often also a sign of fear to express oneself. It is absolutely crucial for writers to develop their own voice: where else will originality come from? (And when I speak of developing one’s own voice, I mean this more in an intellectual sense than a stylistic one: it’s about the ideas you choose to express, more than about any way of expressing them.) But the problem of finding one’s own voice is not the same as the problem of having too much to say, a claim which I make based on my own personal experience: I frequently get stuck because I have too many things to say for this brief essay, and only occasionally get stuck trying to find or express my own voice. So, regardless of finding one’s own voice, a good step for a stuck writer is to choose to take one little step that allows focus and immediate progress, perhaps by picking one idea to write about, even if there are others that are also important to you.

Oftentimes, the problem of having too much to say manifests as a competition between ideas, with each vying for attention as the most important.  A writer once described her experience as a traffic jam of ideas, a metaphor that most of us can understand, where the problem of motion is not caused by the vehicles (the ideas) or the road (the writer’s ability to put words on the paper) but by the vast number of cars (ideas) competing for that limited road space and thus interfering with each other. It’s easy to spend a lot of time thinking about which idea is most important.  And spending that time thinking about what to write, often means not writing.  And not writing, and spending a lot of time thinking about what to write, can be stressful and can trigger anxiety about ability to write, which sets off down a difficult path.

If you have a lot to do, or a lot to say, picking one thing to do, however small, can be a good way to get started. Picking that one thing allows you to focus, put aside distractions, and get something done.  Personally, it’s better to do something than to feel stuck: if I do something small, even if relatively unimportant (e.g., a blog post), I can cross it off my to-do list, and I get that little satisfaction, which can often help me engage with some other, larger and more intimidating project (e.g., my next book).  So start small and focused, and see if that can help you get unblocked.

Taking Small but Useful Steps.

Some writers get stuck by anxiety about what to do next or anxiety about how to do their work. Recently I was working with a writer who does fine, once working, but who gets stuck by anxiety.

We were talking about analyzing some qualitative observations. Our discussion was focused on analytical and theoretical concerns, so we didn’t discuss the practical point I’m suggesting in this post.

If you are struggling with writer’s block of some sort, or you feel stuck when you are trying to write, especially if anxiety is an issue, it can be useful to focus on taking the smallest steps that you can that also make progress.

The writer and I were talking about analyzing statements made by people, and our discussion was concerned with dealing with the bridge between the statements and the analyses. And so what we didn’t talk about the specific practical difference between (1) trying to develop and present an analysis based on a whole corpus or even a sizeable chunk of a corpus, such as an entire paragraph, and (2), trying to develop an analysis based on a single sentence or even a single word.

Often, by focusing on the smallest possible unit, you can define a piece of work that is small enough that it doesn’t seem intimidating.  Focusing on one sentence or one word and trying to explain why it is significant to your work can be much easier than trying to explain a whole paragraph.

Not all words or sentences will be good choices for such focused attention, but if you’re struggling to deal with a larger mass of text—a whole paragraph or more—then one way to approach that text is to simply focus on one feature of interest–one word or phrase or sentence—and explain why that feature seems significant to you.

This is one possible suggestion as an alternative to trying to engage a larger text en masse. It’s a way to get moving and to engage with a project when anxiety might be problematic. In the long run, the whole corpus must be analyzed and discussed, but in the immediate moment, every individual step matters, and if you’re concerned about your progress and struggling with anxiety, taking a single small step can feel like making progress and that can reduce anxiety. And reducing anxiety is often the real key in starting to write.

Fear and Confidence in Writing

Once, a writer told me about a book she really liked called something like The Writer’s Book of Fear. I got a copy and got about as far as the author saying that fear is the defining element of all writing.  I don’t remember exactly what he wrote, but it felt alien to my experience of writing.  This is not to say that I know no fear in writing; I experience many different fears when writing. But fear is not the only thing I feel when writing, by any means. I would say, in fact, that it’s not even close to my dominant emotion when writing.  In my opinion, actually, writing will best grow out of a cautious confidence that you have something to say that is worth saying—and this is a confidence I believe many fearful writers have. Many people believe that they have an important message to communicate, but if asked to write it down, the fear of writing poorly can take over.

Confidence plays a huge role in how writing develops, and for struggling writers, it is often a major cause of writing blocks. Over-confidence can lead to imprudent action and can blind a writer to problems, but on the whole, I would think these are far better problems for a writer than to be paralyzed by doubt. Practically speaking, it’s almost always better for a writer to take the risk of getting rejected than to leave the page blank. 

Here’s a rough self-diagnostic: do you have a history of thinking your work is great and then getting rejected? If so, you might be over-confident, and you might benefit from reviewing your own work a bit more critically in an effort to improve it. But if that’s not your history, and if, indeed, you have a history of thinking your work is poor, even after it has been accepted/approved/graded, then you would likely benefit from having more confidence in your work, or at least writing with a willingness to be wrong—writing to try out ideas and ways of expressing ideas. 

Believing in yourself is crucial, especially if you are self-critical. When I am struggling with doubt about the strength of my work—especially when contrasting my work to other writing I have seen on the same topics—I often try to soothe myself by remembering the wide variety of opinions that any one work will face, which pretty much guarantees that someone will disagree, but also means that there is likely someone who will agree. For many, it’s easier to sink into focusing on the people who will reject the work and the different ways in which it might be rejected than it is to focus on those who will like the work and the different ways it will be accepted. But it’s worth the effort to focus on the  people who will likely be supportive.  Keeping your eyes on the people who will like your work is a good long-term strategy for a writer, because they’re the ones who will support your efforts, so it makes sense to think about how to work with those people.

I don’t want to over-simplify here.  A person who is generally supportive can also be harshly critical. I just got feedback on my book manuscript that basically said “I really like this project, but it needs to be but by 30%.” Along with the general comment the reviewer provided a long list of problems and weaknesses. The bulk of the communication was “cut this,” and “cut that.” With that kind of feedback, it can be pretty easy to lose sight of the crucial “I really like this project” part. If you are looking for support and someone makes a harsh criticism, it can cause emotional distress. In such situations, it’s important to keep an eye on the general motivation for the criticism, and a brief comment of overall support should cast direct criticisms in a different light.  It’s hugely different to receive feedback that says, “This is junk. Look at all the problems:…” than feedback that says “This is great. But look at all these problems:…” The list of problems might be identical, but it’s those crucial three opening words that matter. It takes confidence to hear feedback, but it can also build confidence if you focus on the positive aspects of the feedback.

And, if you have confidence enough to listen to criticism, you can really improve your work by presenting it to others and learning from their feedback. Fear, meanwhile, will make it harder to work on criticism.

Too much doubt is typically the problem for all the writers who have gotten stuck somewhere in the process without finishing a work. Writer’s block—the failure to write—can have roots in many different fears: that you don’t know enough, that you might be wrong, that you don’t write well enough, that other people will disagree, that others will laugh, that you will be rejected, and all the related flavors of doubt.  I don’t think I’ve ever met a writer who struggled with a writing block due to over-confidence.

One of the reasons I find it so valuable to develop and maintain a regular writing practice is that it can reduce some anxieties and fears the come up in the process.  If you practice writing and experiment with putting words on the page, you reduce many anxieties in the process. One big hope is that the regular practice helps you feel less concerned about any single sentence or paragraph: the more sentences you write, the easier it is to focus on the ones you like and ignore the ones you don’t. And each additional sentence you do write, can contribute to your sense that you can produce writing (even if you want to edit it). Other possible benefits of a practice that can help ease the process of writing are that a regular practice in writing will lead  to greater familiarity with your word-processing software, possibly reducing some anxieties there, and, practicing might help you feel more comfortable with punctuation and grammar (not necessarily comfortable, but at least less uncomfortable).  Writing practice can help you find your own voice and that can help you feel more confident, too.

We can’t necessarily control our emotions, but we can develop a writing practice that might give confidence at least in the process, even if doubts about what to write remain.

Multiple Drafts and Writer’s Block

Writer’s block typically arises from a complex of issues. In this post, I discuss one factor that can contribute to writer’s block and how writing multiple drafts and thinking about the different roles of those drafts can help deal with that one difficulty. The idea of writing multiple drafts of a single work is hardly a novel one, but I have not seen this particular take on multiple drafts in relations to writer’s block (and now that I typed that, I’m definitely not going to go look to see if any one else written something similar! I wouldn’t actually be surprised).

One problem that can contribute to writer’s block is the conflict between writing to learn and writing to communicate/writing for presentation.  When writing early drafts of a work, writers are often seeking their argument and their focus, and in such cases, the concern for learning about the work can conflict with concerns for presentation. This can occur in a number of different ways: concern for grammar, spelling and punctuation distract attention from finding an argument. Worries about how readers will respond the work—fear of rejection or memories of previous difficult feedback—can create emotional stress that distracts attention.  One such conflict that can cause problems, which I’ve seen several times with academic writers, is the conflict created using a theorist that you don’t want to cite.  In one case in my experience, a writer who was interested in some ideas from Freud had a professor who hated Freud. Because his professor would respond poorly to works citing Freud, he quite reasonably wanted to avoid citing Freud. At the same time, however, he relied on Freud as an intellectual landmark.  He associated many of the ideas he used with Freud, and so when seeking to understand his own arguments, he turned to Freud. And this created a block: in trying to work through ideas, he would think of Freud, but then he would get stuck because he didn’t want to write about Freud, so his process of intellectual exploration was interrupted by his concern about how his work would be received.

Thinking about the different (and potentially competing) roles of drafts, can, perhaps, help reduce this specific conflict of interests.  If the specific role of your present draft is to learn and explore (and will be mostly private), then maybe you can set aside concerns for presentation and just explore.  Ask yourself: do you have a good sense of your argument—do you need to write to learn?—or do you already have a good focus and now need to think about communicating with your audience—do you need to write for presentation?  

Generally, in early drafts, the purpose is to learn—to learn what you really care about and what is most important for the project. Later, once you’ve committed to a sufficiently tight focus, then you start thinking about how to present ideas and communicate with your audience.  This is something of a simplification: you may never stop learning and changing what you think most important (thus stories of people frantically rewriting at the last minute), even as you try to complete a mature project; and you can gain some benefit from thinking about how to communicate (or at least with whom to communicate) even early in the process of research design.  

As a matter of process, this scenario with the writer trying to write around Freud displays how the two concerns—of learning and of presentation—are in conflict for a writer who is not certain of the precise content, focus and argument of the work.  By specifying the role of a draft as exploratory (and private), then he can go ahead and write about Freud as a point of reference that helps him learn about the shape and scope of his own argument.  Because that first draft is only for learning, there is no need to avoid Freud, who can thus play an important role as an intellectual landmark in the exploration of ideas that is occurring during the writing of the early draft. Putting aside the concern for presentation allows greater freedom in the exploration of ideas, which is crucial in the process of finding one’s own voice and in developing original research.

Once the argument comes into better focus, the writer can switch her/his efforts from learning and intellectual exploration to the question of presentation.  If a draft has already been completed, and the scope of the argument has already been set while using Freud as a point of reference, then the writer then has a much better position from which to work on the question of how best to present his/her own argument.

Basically, if you are not yet sure what you want to say, you benefit from exploring that first.  If you are not sure of what you want to say, it is crucial to explore those ideas with freedom before getting bogged down in presentational details.  If you think of some scholar—Dr.X—when trying to explain your work, explore that connection, explore that relationship. Why is Dr.X important to you? What aspects of Dr.X’s theory are like or unlike yours? What is it about Dr.X’s work that makes it a useful point of reference?  Write these things out to learn about the intellectual terrain on which your work is situated.  Use the landmark of Dr.X help you see the whole landscape of ideas, and thus help you understand your own position better, and also identify other scholars whose work provides useful intellectual landmarks for use in later drafts that get written once your argument has clarified. [This post is about writer’s block and using separate drafts with distinct roles, so I’m not going to get into the question of whether a scholar who “hides” a source by using alternative sources for citations is committing some ethical breach.]

The process of writing about a Dr.X in an early draft can help clarify a sense of purpose and a sense of argument.  Once you have a better sense of direction and focus, then you can turn your attention to crafting an effective presentation that doesn’t rely on Dr.X, ideally by citing alternative scholars who have expressed similar ideas with less problematic context, for example, as might be done by replacing Freud citations with citations from more modern psychodynamic theorists.

I recently wrote about trusting the process in writing. This is, I think, one issue where it’s necessary (1) to recognize that there is an ongoing process, and (2) to give that process space and time to work.  If you don’t see your process as including both drafts for learning and drafts to refine presentation, then you’re forcing yourself into a situation in which your concerns for presentation will work against the necessary process of exploration, and that can contribute to a larger writing block.

If you’re stuck and having trouble finding your voice, put aside your concerns for presentation. First, write to learn, then, later, write for presentation.

Listening to Yourself

Recently, I saw a motivational quotation on the order of “Do what you love and it isn’t work.” It struck me as unrealistic and unhelpful. It fails to capture the difficult and intimate interplay between love and work—whatever kind of love we may be talking about.  Love calls on us to do things that are difficult, even unpleasant or painful. Often we surmount difficulties and minor discomforts for our proudest achievements and best experiences. But it’s possible to face too much difficulty, and too much pain, and then love can be destructive.  To have a healthy relationship with the things we love—whether people or activities or otherwise—it helps to be able to listen to ourselves and make good judgements about how much difficulty is the right amount of difficulty.

Passion often lies where there is great difficulty. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that the best moments in people’s lives occur in activities that present significant challenges—the “Flow” state that Csikszentmihalyi has researched occurs in difficult activities, not easy ones. The activities that he describes as flow activities are ones where there is a danger of failure and a possibility for growth.

Shortly after seeing that motivational quotation, I was out for a run. (I’m not sure I go fast enough to call what I do “running” anymore, but I’ll call it running.) While running, I was thinking about the practice of listening to myself and the value of self-knowledge, and thinking about that in the context of writing and developing a writing practice, as well as the context of going running.

Going running is difficult and it is also something that I love.  When running well, I feel better than I do at any other time.  But I’m liable to aches and pains.  Tendonitis is a frequent issue, as is tightness or cramping.  Understanding these pains and being able to self-diagnose—listening to myself—helps me decide when to run harder and when to stop and engage in some treatment (like stretching).  You don’t want to keep running if running is going to cause more damage or prevent damage from healing; you do want to keep running if the exercise will help resolve the problem. Being able to listen to yourself helps you make a good judgement.

This ability to listen to oneself is valuable in all cases where love leads us to a difficulty: do we continue to follow our passion, or do we pull back because our passion is causing damage? 

To develop a successful writing practice, it’s important to listen to oneself, and to understand which difficulties are a sign to stop and tend to yourself, and which are just difficulty and discomfort to work through.  

This is true at both the physical and emotional levels. Physically, to write, and to work on writing has real dangers—I have known more than one researcher whose work was brought to a near standstill by repetitive stress injuries.  RSIs are better understood now than when I was in graduate school, so fewer people are crippled by them—partly because we better understand the danger and the danger signs (as well as appropriate responses).

Danger of overwork also exists on the emotional level, I believe. It is possible to turn a work practice into something so unpleasant that it becomes hard to work.  The idea that obstacles to writing stem from psychological issues is hardly a new or inventive one. Two sources where I have seen this idea are Neil Fiore’s The Now Habit and Keith Hjortshoj’s book on writing blocks, both of which discuss different psychological issues that inhibit writing.

Whether the pain is physical or emotional, being able to listen to yourself and correctly diagnose the severity of various discomforts can help you develop a more effective writing practice.  And that understanding can help your realize a project that is important to you and also difficult—a project of the sort that is often called a “labor of love.”

A labor of love requires a positive and beneficial practice that provides sufficient rewards to justify the difficulties involved, and part of that requires the ability to listen to yourself in order to understand what the costs are relative to the benefits.

The “do what you love and it isn’t work” trope fails to explain or understand the idea of a labor of love, and so cannot support such a work. If you think that doing what you love means that you don’t have to work, then you will almost certainly interpret all difficulties as a sign of something wrong—perhaps, even that you don’t love what you’re dong enough.  A more realistic view of what constitutes a good relationship recognizes that significant difficulties are part of the best things in life.

For me, the difficulty and frustration of not knowing what to write, of feeling that my ideas are weak or of limited interest, of not knowing how to make a coherent argument, of feeling that my hoped-for and intended argument has totally fallen apart, all of these are real pains. There is real difficulty and distress related to these things.  But is it suffering that will cause long-term damage? Knowing yourself and listening to yourself helps prevent engagement from becoming unhealthy.  

Doing what you love takes work. It involves real frustrations and difficulties. That work and those frustrations and difficulties are not necessarily signs that you’re doing something wrong or that you don’t love enough.  That’s where listening to yourself is about: by listening to yourself, you get information about your processes and you can use that information to develop better, healthier practices.

In this post, I have focused on listening to yourself with respect to managing a writing practice, but as a final note, I want to point out that for a writer being able to listen to yourself—hearing your own voice, and trusting your own judgments—is crucial not only in managing the practice of writing, but in finding material to write.  To write original work, there is no other source than your own voice—but that’s a subject for a different post.

Trusting the Process in Writing

For some writers, there comes a point where it can seem like there’s nothing to write about, or at least nothing worth writing about.  At that point, one option is to simply stop writing.  But, of course, that might not be a good option.  Another option is to skip the big picture and reduce the process to a matter of small steps and to trust that a process of engagement will help you open some paths of development.

Trusting a process is difficult, especially when a deadline looms.  It can be hard to accept that you might benefit from engaging in some apparently trivial task, especially if you feel a lack of basic ideas worth writing about.  But again, if the issue is a choice between being blocked—stuck feeling that there is nothing that you can write or that you want to write about—and trusting the process, then trust the process!

You won’t find something worth writing about by avoiding your project.  And you won’t find much satisfaction in just stopping.  Just stopping leads to the certainty that your project will not be accepted.  Trying to get published? You need a manuscript. Trying to get a degree? You need a manuscript.

Trusting a process can be annoying.  You might ask, “If I can’t find a big issue to write about, what’s the point in engaging with some small tangential task?”  Or you might say “that suggestion is so trivial, it won’t help.”  Such complaints have some validity. There is no question that there is better efficiency found in working on something when you have a clear vision of what you’re going to do.  But, again, the context needs emphasis: saying that it would be better to have a clear vision of your goal doesn’t help if you have no obvious route to gain such a vision. If you are feeling stuck, and feeling lost, trusting the process may be the only alternative that leads to productive activity.

There are usually a large number of minor tasks that a writer can pick up to start engaging with the process.  There is always value in trying to make a one-sentence statement of purpose for a project.  A writer who has lost a sense of direction can particularly benefit from taking the step of writing a one-sentence statement of purpose, and even better if that task is engaged repeatedly: write that one-sentence statement. And then write another one-sentence statement. And another.

A similar task is to write an outline for the work you want to write—this is, in a way, an inversion of the previous task: writing a one-sentence statement of purpose focuses on the over-arching structure.  Writing an outline focuses on the pieces that make up the structure.  It’s certainly possible to write an outline without having a clear sense of what your final argument will be—perhaps you have a few examples that you want to discuss, or a few issues—even if you don’t know exactly how they are related, you can put them into some outline.

If tasks like doing a statement of purpose or an outline seem intimidating, there are also tasks that are more granular.  Pick one sentence from an old draft and focus on that one sentence. What is good about it? What is bad about it? What could you do differently? Pick one idea from an old draft and write about what you hoped for with that idea and what problems you have faced. 

Or pick some publication in your field to which you can contrast your own work. Why is it like yours? To what extent are you interested in the same issues? And where do your interests differ? If you don’t know what you want to write about, you might find some subject of interest by looking at what others have written and thinking about how you want your work to compare.

Or, if you have empirical data that you have gathered, go back to that data and ask yourself again what the data shows. If you have empirical data, you should be focused on writing what is there in the data.

I’m a big fan of having a clear vision of where you want to go—an overarching sense of purpose and sense of direction are powerful guides for a writer.  But it’s possible to lose sight of those goals in the midst of a project. If you are wandering around the conceptual landscape wondering where to situate your writing, don’t scorn taking small steps. Small steps may seem meaningless or worthless—there’s little clear direction in writing about an idea you’ve rejected, or about an author whose work you don’t think you can use—but the process of engaging them earnestly can at least give you more information to figure out where you stand in the conceptual landscape, and where you might want to go.

Taking small steps that seem pointless may involve taking steps that are almost no help whatsoever. Maybe some of the small steps you take lead directly to dead-ends.  Those steps don’t directly contribute to the draft you’re trying to create.  But such steps do contribute to the process—they may not help a draft directly, but a series of such small steps helps delineate the project: every step you take that leads to a dead-end also helps set limits of the project, and seeing limits on the project can be useful in understanding what is and is not part of the project.  And the more such small steps you take, the more likely it is that you will hit upon some idea that is valuable and interesting.

Engaging in a process of taking small steps can be frustrating, but if you’re paralyzed or confused, it’s a very useful process for getting out of paralysis and at least limiting confusion.  Stuff is complex, so I’m not going to claim that you will ever be able to eliminate confusion. But the more that you engage, the greater the chance that you will find something that you do feel confident about.

Of course, you need to engage with some energy. It’s not enough to look at an article or passage from an old draft and just say to yourself that you don’t want to use it—you won’t learn much that way. You have to try to explicate in writing why you don’t want to use it.

If you’re feeling lost or paralyzed and you have stopped working, don’t put pressure on yourself to find the big answer. Big answers are really, really hard to find.  Instead, try to take tiny steps: work over old material and ask whether you like it and how to adapt it. Pick something to read and to write about. Make a quick, simple outline. Write one sentence about something.  Trust the process of working on your project because a process can help guide your actions in moments when you are having trouble seeing a larger sense of purpose.

Feeling Overwhelmed? Focus on one thing.

Sometimes, I get stuck as a writer because I start feeling overwhelmed by myriad issues, none severe in itself, but in combination more than enough to distract from the focus required by writing.

There are any number of potential distractions that interfere with writing. Chores and regular life continually present many demands. Maybe no chore or errand is crucial or particularly difficult, but they gain weight in combination as other responsibilities multiply: taking out the trash is trivial if you have plenty of time, but when you’re running late, it can be significant. Everyday life is a constant background noise that can contribute to feeling overwhelmed.

For me, an additional drain on my focus comes as I consider the state of the world. In my opinion, it is a civic duty for the citizen of a democracy to remain aware of news, and reading the news is, on one level no more than a necessary chore like washing dishes. Except for the fact that the news is so vexing. I find myself sometimes overwhelmed by the enormity of the real problems that face humanity, starting with climate change, but including the vast range of issues.  Sometimes, the process of writing can provide some refuge, but these problems are present and demanding attention, and again contributing to a sense of being overwhelmed.

And then on another level—much more specific to the process of writing—I sometimes find myself overwhelmed with my own limitations as a writer. For all my practice, for all my effort and work, each new attempt to communicate my ideas involves significant effort and frustration, even when things generally go well!  Even if sentences are generally flowing, and I’m writing a fairly large amount, there is, at the second-to-second or minute-to-minute level, a series of pauses and struggles as each new sentence struggles to fit into both the structure that I imagined when I started and the vision that has developed in the process of writing. Add in to this mix all the doubts I have—have I spelled correctly? have I punctuated correctly? is my phrasing going to be clear? how will different people read that statement? Am I repeating something I wrote before?—and it’s pretty easy to get weighed down with the multiplicity of concerns.

And then on yet another level, I often find myself overwhelmed with ideas.  This is a common problem, I think: someone wrote to me recently to complain of a “traffic jam” of ideas.  Having too many ideas is consistently one of the problems I see in writers who generally do good research: their project bogs down as they try to address every different dimension of a general interest.  In writing this post about feeling overwhelmed, for example, I had manage all the different ways in which I can get overwhelmed—the complication and difficulty comes from the many different threads that can contribute to the larger fabric of feeling overwhelmed, and I can’t talk about all of them at once, and until I make a choice among them about which to discuss first, I can become stuck. 

The more choices a writer has, the easier it is to become overwhelmed, because each choice demands attention. In combination, writing presents difficulties that can be compounded by other difficulties, and these can lead to feeling overwhelmed.

When that happens, I find that my most effective response is to try to focus on something small—something that I need to do, perhaps, and that can be done pretty easily. But only one thing. So, for example, I take out the trash, without worrying about cleaning the whole house. It’s one step in the right direction.  When I would get stuck writing my dissertation, I would often pick one small thing—a citation or page number I needed, for example—without having to fix all the problems that I knew were waiting. When feeling swamped by ideas and other concerns, I can focus on one thing—one idea, one problem—and work on that without concern for other issues. Focus doesn’t solve all my problems, but at least it helps me solve some of them.