Max’s 5 Ways to Get Over Writer’s Block During your PhD
I often talk to PhD students who are at a point where they find it really hard to productively write. Sometimes this comes along with very negative emotional feelings — feeling stuck and unable to progress, and also often feeling lonely. I tend to have five aspects of advice for people to try. It all depends on the problem you are experiencing, but try them all and see what works! Hopefully one or more.
1) Do it with other people
In my opinion, writing is inherently social. There’s a feeling, especially for reports during a PhD (because they are kind of down to the individual), that writing is something you have to do alone. When thinking like this, people start to feel like writing is something they do not look forward to and it becomes one of the main barriers to writing that I have observed in students. They just don’t want to go home to the sad place where they have to write all day, while everyone else is having fun at the lab.
Let’s ignore for a start that most writing during a PhD (at least in my area) involves multiple authors — that is evidently social. Even when you are writing sections for your own thesis, you are typically getting feedback on text you have written — this is also social and I recommend the best way is to write a bit and discuss it a bit and write a bit and discuss it a bit, so that it never feels like you just have a big document to write and no one to talk to.
More importantly though, at any one time, I expect there are a dozen other PhD students who feel like they are also writing alone. I am a big fan of social writing clubs where people get together in a place, and all write alone together, and as long as they are not creating a distraction they a) encourage each other to write, and b) can ask each other things about their writing or phrasing. I recommend building in times for coffee and lunch in social writing, where people can do these bits without interrupting writing. Write a bit, talk a bit, and do it together. Here’s a tip: your advisors are also probably not writing things they should be writing, and would like to write alone together too. My current writing club (8 people) is half faculty members.
2) Shake up the place
It may be that it’s not so much the lack of people, but the place that is starting to feel like a place that is absent of achievement. One of the most successful changes I see people enact is to try writing somewhere new. The office walls are boring, the corner of the dining table isn’t really ideal and the chores are all around you (I mean house tasks not your housemates). The first thing I suggest people try, if you want anonymous bustle and noise, is try moving it to a cafe. There’s coffee there and with headphones and background noise, people often suddenly feel the words are there to write. I often combine this with our writing club. We tour cafes and discover new places. A second approach is to find a peaceful place. There are two or three places I have found around campus, or out in the park if its not raining, that I can hide away in and be productive. I seek low-traffic quiet buildings, with a quiet corner, ideally with a view of nature. And if you’ve got some $£€¥, third idea is go to a random remote forest or mountainside cottage for a few days. We’ve once taken a writing club to a cottage for a week in the approach to a big deadline, but also during my PhD, my parents went a trip to a remote cottage, and my family joined them for a few days. It was on the premise that they wanted help enable me with the thing I was struggling with too, and everyone was invested in my finding protected writing time (#4 below) in a room with a view to write, and then join them all for family time.
Anyway — the point is there. Shake it up and try a new place. Check that its not the place that you are avoiding.
3) Pick a single type of writing each session
I’ve written recently about my five different types of writing. I highlight it here as a blocker, because I see time after time students are trying to do all 5 at once and making what feels like snail-pace progress, and it becomes disheartening. People become much more productive and feel more self-reward when they do just one of these. “Today I am going to text-dump into chapter 2, and text -dump only.” I feel most rewarded when I do this, because I can do most of the other types of writing in gaps between meetings, but generating large portions of new text is hardest to protect, followed by editing (because you have to keep concepts in your head). However, I also feel just as good when I say: “right, lets get all the references into my bibliography for chapter 4.” Whichever way, it is a lot easier to feel a rewarding and positive achievement when you have a focused goal using one type of writing only.
If you are really feeling like you are doing all 5 things in this writing-block guide, but still can’t think what to write, then text-dumping is my favourite recommendation. Being productive in writing does not mean writing good text it means writing text. It’s actually a lot easier to improve text than it is to write good text first time. And with text-dumping you can just garbage dump whichever bit you feel like is ready to come out of your fingers, in any order, because later you will use other types of writing to improve it. Reduce all barriers that you can and feel the freedom to just get any words out, in any order, even repeating the same bit to see how it sounds in different ways. Once it’s out, you can work with it.
4) Protect time for writing
The first rule of avoiding writing is avoid writing. “I’ll just do these things and then after I’ll do some writing” is the most common phrase I hear from students that are struggling to write. And it is also the most common thing I tell myself. However, good writing needs large portions of the day that are completely uninterrupted by meetings — all interruptions reduce your ability to maintain the level of thought need to be productive, especially when editing text. A half an hour meeting mid-morning makes the whole morning unproductive. Say no to people and meetings. I also, very personally, find that the morning is the best time for me to write, and its very hard not to just process some emails, then go and make a coffee, then check in with a couple of people, and then half the morning is gone. DON’T DO IT. Find some way to protect large uninterrupted blocks of time to write. My own technique for this was to block large chunks of my calendar with a single event (e.g. all day) called ‘Something’. So that I can say sorry, I have something in my diary.
I only discovered it whilst being a parent of a teenager, but I am extremely productive writing in my parked car, outside some sports club for two hours. That’s where I am right now. I put this post together, which has been ready to come out of my fingers for ages, in just over an hour, including editing and improving it.
5) Stop writing (!), exercise, and eat properly
Finally, but importantly, as much progress comes from stopping at the right times, as it does from protecting time to write. Now lets be clear. This is not me giving you a green light to undermine number #4. But, I have seen plenty of students enter a lifestyle of unhealthiness when it comes to the final thesis. Writing all day, with nothing by snacks and coffee, as if that is helping the brain to write the biggest, deepest, richest document of your life. Alongside protecting time to write, you need to protect time to eat well, at the right time, and to do some exercise. The brain can think about writing if it wants while you making a proper breakfast (early enough not to eat into writing time — it’s not part of protected writing time). It can also think about your writing, if it wants, while you go outside for a dog walk or short hike, or even while you walk to the best coffee shop. Get that fresh air, or go exercise in the way that you like to exercise, around your protected writing time. Guaranteed, when you come back to the desk to write, you will be more productive for the next however-long, than if you force yourself to stay at the desk solidly for 12 hours of panic thesis writing. This is true of your weekend and personal time too — if you do number #4 correctly during the week, and avoid giving into the unnecessary little things you could do at the lab, and get good writing sessions in when you need to, then you can comfortbly go and do what you want at the weekend and enjoy it. Not doing #4 above tends to be the main reason people do not do #5.
I hope those are useful ideas for people. Tell me your own techniques!