How I Overcame Writer’s Block
“I stopped adopting everyone else’s questions and started seeking answers to my own.”
I’ve been on medium for a couple of months now and I have been going through it trying to write a piece. I thought it’d be simple enough to get started — I like to write, I’m not bad at it, I have the freedom to write about whatever I want with no boundaries or limitations — but nope. It was not that simple at all. From the first day, a huge figurative block has been sitting on my skull, pressing down my frontal lobe and suffocating Broca’s area.
Just selecting a topic was surprisingly difficult, despite the fact that I could visit the home page and find an article written on anything from pee play to Chinese menus and immigration. Then, when I finally did select a topic, I couldn’t come up with a title and after that, I couldn’t produce any actual content for the body and if I did, I thought it was garbage. The air around me was always thick with the all of the words I needed, floating just within reach, but I couldn’t see to grab them. I could hear their muffled sounds but couldn’t make sense of it. I would stare at my computer screen and live out that iconic scene in Spongebob (you know the one) and eventually throw my hands in the air and go to bed trusting that it would “come to me tomorrow.”
It was maddening.
My writer’s block went beyond not knowing what to write about or how to write it. I was blocked from enjoying writing itself. I didn’t take pleasure in the process of creating and revising, even though I’ve always taken great pleasure in editing and even rewriting other people’s work.
Eventually I proudly posted my first article, a 12 minute read!… and happily deleted it four days later because I felt like a failure. That was when I realized that this “block” was actually a complex monster abed within me that I had to confront and defeat if I was ever going to move forward. Defeating it meant making a few changes within myself. Here’s what they were.
I stopped adopting everyone else’s questions and started seeking answers to my own.
Writing has always come naturally when I have something to say and words have always come easy when I’m being introspective. I realized that it wasn’t that I couldn’t think of anything. For crying out loud I didn’t have 36 stories in my drafts because I couldn’t think of anything. The real problem was that I didn’t care to write about any of those things because I felt no connection to them. I wanted my words to be insightful and quenching. I wanted to pull people, engage minds, excite them, appeal to their intelligence and their hearts — all when I myself wasn’t even interested in what I had chosen to write about. Writing came much easier when I asked myself a question about something I genuinely wanted to know and then wrote to answer it.
I forgave myself for quitting for 4 years
This was a tough pill. For the last several years, I have been cruelly ashamed of myself for being a mediocre writer and, until now, I had never identified the source of that shame. I mistakenly believed that it was because I was putting too much importance on how poorly I compared to amazing writers. Ironically, when I compared myself to peers, I was just as hard on myself for not being even better. I realize now that at the core, I wasn’t just ashamed — I was angry with myself.
In school, English class was where I excelled and I was ever encouraged to pursue a career in writing. Instead, I abandoned my dream of seeing my novels taught in literature courses and I stopped writing poetry and short stories. I swallowed a tall of glass of writer’s guilt and decided to focus on what was really important, like majors and careers that “made sense.”
For the next four years I didn’t write one word and, unsurprisingly, my writing suffered. As a result, now, instead of appreciating my work as a product of years of practice, I would see it as the consequence of neglect. Believing that whatever I write should be a hundred times better in quality is why I’ve struggled so much to write anything. It’s terrible pressure, not to mention it’s prideful (As if I would have become the next featured author on Oprah’s book club. Insert laughing emoji).
I will no longer be paralyzed by this way of thinking. Now, as it would have been otherwise, the only way to go from this point is forward.
I stopped restricting how much of myself I allowed in my writing
I made it a priority to make my writing impersonal. Of course I let my voice be heard, but I wrote in a way that detached myself from the content of the paper. If any personal views or opinions or beliefs were in my paper, nobody better think they’re mine. I aimed to organize my thoughts in a way that people could understand and connect with while trying to sound as objective as possible. I would re-write titles and restructure my sentences and paragraphs so as to not sound biased in any way. It made my writing rigid, which made me never want to share it. I thought that if I allowed too much of myself in my writing, then I would lose credibility as a nuanced, objective thinker.
Now, I approach my papers first like a journal. I write not only to share my thoughts with others, but with the hope of also better understanding myself. As I write, I’m having a conversation with myself and I find that the words come naturally without hesitation or afterthought.
I gave my writing a new purpose
I recently overheard a conversation during which a young woman was asked what she wanted to do with her life. After submitting an answer, the professor she was conversing with offered this piece of advice:
“Absolutely everything that you choose to do from this moment forward should be in service of achieving your purpose in life.”
There must always be two purposes in writing, or really whatever you do: 1) To serve whatever desire you have for yourself and for your life. In my case, I write in pursuit of knowledge, to connect with people and to preserve moments in time that I can reflect on in the future when I am a different version of myself. 2) To meet whatever obligation you agreed to in the contract you signed
I stopped expecting perfection without revision
I have a bad habit of thinking that if it doesn’t sound perfect the first time then it’s not worth working with. I’ve had to learn that the art of writing is in the revision, just as with composing music or drawing sketches. Perfection won’t come from the expectation that it be perfect. Rather it is the result of taking what exists and lovingly addressing and fixing each unique flaw. A danger in comparing oneself to the master is that it’s easy to forget that the masterpiece is simply a better version of something that may have not even been very good.
I stopped making it about the money and made it about the craft
I wasn’t writing solely because I like writing, I was trying to earn quick cash. I struggled to write in a way that would guarantee clicks, claps and money in my pockets, and it took all the fun right out of it. I thought I had writer’s block but I couldn’t even open my mind to new ideas because I was making a chore out of it. Of course now I don’t write with the expectation or even the hope of making money. I’ve stopped looking at is as a make-it-or-break-it job and honestly, I’ve never been happier to click click away.
