When You Don’t Know What to Write About, Try This:
I remember being assigned an essay in 5th grade that had to be at least two pages, double-spaced.
Of course today, that’s no more than a 10-minute task. But as an 11-year-old, that’s practically a dissertation.
I digress.
Unlike other essays—i.e. ‘book summaries’ or ‘curriculum reports’—the exercise was meant strictly for creative purposes. Besides the two-page minimum, the only ‘guideline’ we had to follow, was for all of us in class to start our essays with the words:
“It was a dark and stormy night…”
(I think it was around Halloween. Ole’ Edgar Allen woulda been fond.)
I already had a knack for writing at the time (I wrote comics with my buddies in class), so I was genuinely excited for the assignment—a rare occasion, considering academia was not my favorite world to be in.
I wiggled in my chair, and before I could think of storyline, I found myself typing those first 7 words with pride and ease. But immediately upon typing the ‘t’ in ‘night’, my fingers froze. So did my brain.
I decided to take a few minutes to think of a plot-line, but nothing came to mind. I couldn’t think of a character name, a setting, nothing—the blinking cursor teased me from the screen.
It was the first time I experienced writer’s block.
Writer by profession or writer by hobby, we’ve all experienced writer’s block.
We sit at our computers, wrists cocked, fingers-ready to pounce and… nothing. Just a bright, white, blank document, staring at you. Daring you to put words on screen. Utterly taunting you.
It sucks.
As a professional writer, I run into it all the time. I sit at my Mac and beg ideas in my head to manifest themselves in the form of size 10 Arial font on screen. I don’t even look at the cursor because the continuous blink, blink, blink, makes me anxious.
Sometimes, it comes in the middle of a piece. I’ll have already typed up the first part of an article and suddenly run out of mojo to keep going; but I can usually get out of that pickle by taking a short break and re-reading what I had already written, aloud to myself.
But most of the time, it’s before a piece even gets going.
It happened again a few nights ago.
My goal was to write a personal piece about thought leadership, finish by 11 and get to bed—a reasonable time, as I started around 9:15.
But for an entire hour, I sat at my laptop and put nothing on the screen.
A few moments here and there I found a spark, and typed up a few paragraphs. But after reading them back to myself, I felt obliged to erase and start over.
It was almost 10:30 when I decided to lay on the floor and relax. I call it, ‘doing nothing’, and I’ve actually made it a hobby of mine (apparently ‘getting off topic’ is a another one, too).
Anyway, as I laid there thinking about how often I get writer’s block, and how common writer’s block is for, well, everyone, I thought of a way to beat it:
Write about writer’s block.
When blanking on topics, or on new ideas, most writers tend to look outward for inspiration.
They try and find what’s wrong with society, or trends in booming industry, or look to nature or other works of literature. And aside from keeping a personal journal, most people don’t think to write about an issue the very issue they’re dealing with: having “nothing” to write about.
Don’t make an excuse and quit.
If you experience writer’s block, write about that experiences. Share with everyone what it feels like, personally, to be stuck staring at a screen with nothing on it. Talk about what got you into the mess in the first place—lack of preparation, little sleep, what have you.
In the few minutes after thinking about how to write about writer’s block, I came up with tons and tons of potential article titles on the topic. And coming up with these titles was effortless, considering everything I thought up came directly from what I was experiencing in the moment.
Next time you’re face-to-face with writer’s block, beat it by writing about it.
