Writer's block, part 1

One reason some writers are resistant to the idea of writing in smaller chunks of time is something we’ve all heard of and probably experienced: writer’s block. It’s that awful feeling that comes with sitting down at your laptop or open notebook and realizing you have no idea what to write. Usually this feeling is some mix of panic, hopelessness, and imposter syndrome: There’s a sense of urgency, of not wanting to waste your time just staring at a screen because then you are not a Real Writer. Never would a Real Writer just sit and stare and be so unproductive.

Of course, that’s not really the case. Plenty of well-known writers have experienced writer’s block, and we don’t respect them any less for it. But it’s harder to respect the blocked writer when it’s you in front of that blank screen, and a lot of that discrepancy has to do with condemnation.

I like using the word instead of because it’s closer to what we often really mean. Judgment can be a good thing, showing discernment and the ability to think critically (another word that’s often used to mean only something negative). But condemnation is called for much less often than we use it, especially in relation to ourselves. We boot up the computer, and if the words don’t come immediately, we think it must mean something bad about ourselves that we wouldn’t necessarily think if it were someone else in our position.

Some of us get writer’s block just thinking about the possibility. When I began drafting this post, I put the title at the top of the page and took a few minutes thinking about what I wanted to say and in what order—and then I realized that, to the guy sitting next to me, a blank screen with only “writer’s block” at the top must look pretty hilarious. This is the kind of thing that used to get in my head and make me think I must be blocked because my fingers weren’t already flying over the keys, but now, I have to admit, it pretty funny. So I wrote what I did have (a few bullet points on why we get writer’s block and what to do about it) and got to work.

But more often, we get writer’s block from overthinking. To me, overthinking isn’t actually too much thinking; it’s too much thinking about things that won’t help you toward your goal. With overthinking, the reason for the thinking gets lost. Instead of thinking about writing only when we’re actually doing it, we think about whether we’re any good, about whether we’re making the most of our writing time, about whether our last writing success—a published story, an acceptance from an agent, or a writing session when the words came easily and seemed perfect—was a reflection of our talent and hard work or just a fluke. And these thoughts often lead us to condemn ourselves, which makes us feel demoralized even before we sit down to write.

So if overthinking and condemnation lead to writer’s block, what can we do about it? Next week, I’ll break down some common manifestations of this overthinking and present effective solutions for each problem.