Writer’s Block is a malady many of us in higher education face.
That is, we experience times when we can’t produce work. Either we are tired, overwhelmed, fearful, uncertain, have lost the “muse,” or we simply don’t care about our subject.
Whatever the reason, there are ways to overcome this problem.
- Stop making excuses and Just Do It! Enough said.
- Clean your desk or workspace. This is a metaphor for clearing your head. Once the desk is cleared and clean, you might find yourself thinking clearly. However, for some, the opposite is true. They need a messy creative work environment. The point is doing the opposite of what you think you need.
- Find a book closest to you, open the book, find an arbitrary sentence, and start writing about this sentence. You might write anything that comes to mind about the sentence: how silly it is, how profound it is, how it doesn’t make sense out of context. Whatever you write, you are writing. Keep it up! This is also known as “writer’s block bingo.”
- Create writing rituals that help you get into the mood/space to write. For some, this might mean having on a certain type of music or producing a hot cup of coffee or tea. When I was writing my dissertation, I needed to be wearing a certain type of [soft] clothing, the temperature of the room needed to be cool, I needed to have my hair pulled back off of my face, and my desk needed to be clear of distractions. These became my writing rituals. They still work.
- Turn off distractions. We at ProfHacker have written about this before. But if you are “blocked,” use the distractions to get you writing. For example, if you are on Twitter and you read a tweet from someone you and disagree with the content of that tweet, don’t tweet back. Sit at your computer and write a longer response on your word processor. You’ll be writing.
- Get some physical exercise. Stretching, yoga, a walk, a bicycle ride, a run can help you focus your energies on the physical. Once you have worked through your anxiety at a physical level, you can begin intellectual work you need to do.
- Perform a Rhetorical Revision of your work-in-progress. (If you are writing an article or a dissertation chapter and you get stuck, take the idea and revise it for a different audience or purpose. Your diss chapter is a comparison of Faulkner and Foucault’s panopticon? Make a t-shirt design or bumper sticker of your thesis. This can be harder than it sounds, but it will help you look and think about your subject differently. The writing will then come easier.
Listed above are some proven methods to help break writer’s block, but certainly there are more. Please add your suggestions in comments below.
[Image by Flickr user Rennett Stowe. Used under Creative Commons license.]
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2 Responses to Writer’s Bootcamp: Breaking Writer’s Block
Abby Knoblauch - March 25, 2010 at 2:39 pm
I absolutely suffer from this, but I know full well that writing isn’t what scares me — it’s the lack of writing that scares me, and yet I avoid it because of that fear (fear that is technically linked to the lack, and not the writing itself). But it is also linked to the writing itself: there’s the fear of failure. The inferiority complex. The fear that I have nothing worthwhile to say. That everything I’m writing is obvious. So there’s that, too. One of my friends and I just reminded ourselves that we have to be each others’ cheerleaders and kick each others’ butts, too. Mostly I need a Tim Gunn to remind me to make it work.
But some of the best advice I received while writing my dissertation, and something I’m trying to remind myself as I now try to publish, is a version of “stop making excuses and just do it.” My friend said, “Look, you put your butt in the chair. Every day. And you try to write. Sometimes it’ll happen and sometimes it won’t. When it doesn’t, don’t get too upset. Just put your butt in the chair again tomorrow and try it again.”
Now I just need to go take all that advice and write something, right?
Let me end with a related question: I’m in rhetoric and composition. I tend to look in quite a few disparate places for CFPs, but also the Penn State cite, but does anybody have any good suggestions for CFP possibilities?
Amanda - March 26, 2010 at 10:33 am
When I was writing my dissertation, the thing that worked for me was to write for two hours in the morning before I even got dressed (but after I’d made a big pot of coffee). That way it didn’t feel like the day had quite started yet, which somehow made the writing seem less intimidating. Then I’d call a halt and start the day and get out of the apartment. Not every day was equally productive, but it nearly always got me around the initial blank screen panic.