Locked up in the Writers Block

Published in

Writers Guild

3 min readJun 5, 2019

If you’re a writer, like myself, you have likely experienced the annoyance and soul-crushing frustration at being stuck in writers block. You sit, staring at your computer, starting in fits and bursts but never getting more than a paragraph or a line into what you want to write. You find other outlets. You procrastinate essays and pieces and write short gimmicks on Medium instead. You latch onto distractions and turn into long rambling trains of thought that never seem to find resolution.

You find anything at all to do instead of what you ought to be doing.

I like to imagine experiencing writers block as being led into a special area of a prison, where the wardens give you a million different ideas, spread on different papers with computers and tables and notebooks abound. There’s just too much! How are you supposed to make something coherent when the world is swimming around you with opportunities and inspiration?

Because for me, that’s what writers block manifests itself as.

For others, the block might appear as a blank cell, one of those rooms where the walls and floors are padded, where you are tied up in a straitjacket and can’t get your muse to listen to you. But for me, writers block has always been an issue of focusing on one subject and following through on that subject to the end. When I was a young writer, I was really good at starting stories, but I could never seem to finish them. Now, I can write outlines galore, but putting the actual pen to paper and committing to creating a character is enormously challenging.

Hence my reason for writing something, anything else.

Books are big things. They are unwieldly packs of paper, bound and sewn together, full of thousands of words, paragraphs and fragmented sentences. They are, in short, intimidating. Whereas writing a 500-word post on Medium or any other platform is not as such. Even writing academic essays does not carry the same weight as writing, rewriting and rerewriting a book. So, maybe the writing block isn’t that there’s too much inspiration in the world, but rather that there is this large ominous challenge that simply won’t go away.

Since I was very young, I’ve always wanted to write a book. I would take on the National Novel Writing Month Challenge. I would write short story after short story. Now, though. I struggle to get past that crippling sensation that nothing I write in the quest for that book will be enough. That I can more easily write these short posts, so I should do that instead.

But that’s not the kind of writer or person that I am.

If shying away from a challenge is something I would never do in real life, what makes me think that I can give into that behavior on the black page and in the written word? Writers block may be crippling, and it might very well feel like being trapped in a prison without any prospect of release. But I have the rest of my life to write that book, and I intend on doing it, one step and one writers block sentence at a time.