3 Simple Strategies to Cure Writer’s Block
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The question I get more than any other is some version of: What do I do when I’m stuck? How do I cure writer’s block? We all get stuck for all kinds of reasons: time, anxiety, self-doubt. Life. Work. Dogs. Babies. Google.
And the best answers I’ve come up with—the ones that works for me—are the opposite of what, I think, people expect to hear. Because for me, overcoming writer’s block isn’t about willpower, or discipline, or making yourself do something you don’t want to do.
Here are three strategies I recommend to cure writer’s block:
#1: Try tweaking your environment.
You move a chair in your living room so that it’s facing a slightly different direction.
Huh.
Yes—it looks better that way.
But now the side table doesn’t fit. You decide to switch it out with the one from your bedroom.
Nice!
But now, the chair and side table are really calling for a lamp. Maybe that one that you keep in the corner and never turn on would work here…
Suddenly you’ve rearranged your room, and as you look at it, you feel a sense of: Ahhhhh. I can breathe in here now.
There’s a version of this—and I don’t even mean a metaphorical version—that can give your writing life that same freshening up, a big breath, a new openness. With some simple rearranging, suddenly your creative mind feels more spacious, open to new ideas and inspiration.
I recently updated my writing space. I had stacks of papers toppling over into one another—bills mixed in with doctor's notes mixed in with my novel draft pages. Looking at it made me feel behind and chaotic and like meh.
So I took three hours one morning and, instead of writing, I did something about it. Here was the result:
I'm no home organizing professional, but I was pleased.
Any fellow Marie Kondo fans? I think she's a genius. She gave us all permission to have higher standards for our environments. She swept into all our homes and said, the standard is no longer, "Can I tolerate this?" The standard is, "Does this enrich my existence?" In one simple shift she made it okay to want to actually enjoy our spaces.
Do you enjoy your writing space? You should enjoy your writing space.
And it's not just about the space. In the same way that adjusting one piece of furniture can have a rippling effect, causing you to re-envision a room, a simple physical change in your writing practice can jostle you out of writer’s block. I keep a stack of different color pens next to me and swap them out whenever I feel like it, even if it's mid-sentence. Sometimes, just by switching from pink to blue, I get a fresh idea.
In sum, if you’re in a creative rut or facing writer’s block, try taking the solution outside the realm of mental work and into your physical space.
What can you switch up? Some ideas:
Use a new notebook (that you love).
Use a new pen (that you love).
Write in a new location (that makes you happy).
Find some sunlight.
Move a lamp.
Change a light bulb to one with a different color (that makes you happy).
Buy something small and put it within your field of vision—flowers, a plant, a candle.
Change the font you’re typing in to one you like more.
Change the view of your writing software—most programs have a Focus mode that allows you to block out all other tabs/apps on your screen.
#2: Entertain yourself when you write
Still struggling to cure writer’s block? Try this: Have fun.
Write what entertains you. Not some imaginary reader from the future, or the internal voice of your sophomore year English professor.
What idea—when you think about writing it—makes you eager to sit down and start? What scene—or crazy notion (a poem? But I'm not a poet!)—makes you eager to grab a pen?
What sounds like it's almost ridiculous because it would be such a good time to do?
Two years ago my best friend and I went to another friend's beach house for a week to write a TV pilot about a prim and proper southern matriarch who runs a debutante society but secretly is part of an underground global terrorist group. Neither of us had ever written for TV, but we didn't care. We had the best time, and it jostled me out of my "normal" writing mode to try something new and adventurous.
So if you're stuck, how about this: set aside your 900-page novel, or your thesis, or your blog post. What do you think sounds really fun to write right now?
Maybe it’s a poem. Maybe it’s a McSweeney’s list, or that story about the time you got stuck in the bathroom, or were on an airplane with Britney Spears.
When we are having trouble writing and curing writer’s block, instead of trying to go from zero to 60—to go from being stuck to suddenly, freely writing Chapter 17 of our epic saga—let’s try to go from zero to three: to writing, at all. Let’s try to rediscover the pleasure of writing and see where that leads.
Hopefully, it leads back to Chapter 17...but also back to having a good time.
#3: Write like you talk
“You write like you talk.”
I’ve been told this several times over the years, and for a long time, I didn’t know whether it was a compliment or not.
Is that a good thing? I’d wonder. Or am I supposed to be writing like, I don’t know, Shakespeare?
Over time, working with other writers and teaching other writers, I’ve come to believe that writing fatigue—which we all experience—is often a product of creating writing that is too far removed from how we speak.
More than once, a writer friend or student has said they’re burnt out and stuck, then asked me to read some pages.
And more than once, by paragraph two, I think I see why why they are having trouble curing writer’s block or why they’re burnt out: they’re weighing their sentences down with flowery adjectives and verbs like "masticate" instead of chew or "perambulate" instead of walk. Sometimes it’s hard to follow the sentence or figure out what’s happening in the scene because of the wordiness.
I'm not immune; I've caught myself doing it. ("I need a different word than 'said'! I've said 'said' too much!") (Stephen King has a great little comment on this: "All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine.")
Ironically, I think this phenomenon of weighing down a paragraph with that necessary evil—words—can happen when we're so focused on creating beautiful prose that the prose stops reading like speech; it doesn’t sound natural.
On the other hand, I’ve worked with people who assure me they are not writers and then, when I read their work, I can’t put it down.
Almost invariably, what are these people doing that's so effective? Writing like they speak. So while they may not "feel" like to themselves like they are real writers, whatever that means, they are very much so.
Sometimes, the solution to curing writer’s block and moving ahead is to simply tell the story. Don’t suss it up. Don’t tease it out and drown it in hairspray. Just tell it, as if to a friend.
Why do we make it so hard?
