Beating Writer’s Block
Five steps I take when I’m feeling uninspired and stuck
Across the decades, writers have certainly done a lot to romanticize the condition called writer’s block, to make it sound foreboding and difficult to escape, but my strongest inclination is to say it isn’t real.
Sure, we all have days where the writing is harder than others, and yes, we all have moments when we fear that we’ve run out of meaningful, novel ideas to share with the world. But it’s pretty clear to me that the mythic status that “writer’s block” has taken on is both unearned and self-defeating. Like the belief that a writer can only make good work when “inspired”, the belief in writer’s block is a fiction that takes the responsibility for creating out of the writer’s hand, and puts it in the hands of some magical force outside of them entirely.
There isn’t much scientific support for the idea of writer’s block being a unique cognitive condition. The few studies that exist on the subject paint writer’s block as basically indistinguishable from procrastination or burnout, meaning it’s a usually-temporary state of low motivation that develops when a person fears criticism or has run out of mental energy because they’ve been working too hard. Beyond that, there aren’t really any psychological theories that explain the nature of writer’s block in a…
