Why You’re Thinking About Writer’s Block In The Wrong Way
A lot of people suffer from writer’s block.
(Those people have obviously never read my article on curing writer’s block forever.)
Aside from the above article, very few solutions to writer’s block actually work.
That’s because they’re trying to address and solve the wrong problem.
Writing is easy. In fact, there are no real excuses for not being able to write.
Stephen Hawking writes books. He can’t move at all. If he can do it, then an able-bodied person is certainly capable of writing an article or two a day.
What Are You Talking About, Jamie?
The first step to curing writer’s block is admitting that you don’t have a problem.
Writing as a mechanical task is easy. You put your fingers to your keyboard or lift your pen and off you go.
Ultimately, writer’s block isn’t a mechanical problem. It’s not about writing itself.
Otherwise, you could say, “I have writer’s block right now, so I’ll use a Dictaphone” and that’d be the equivalent of curing writer’s block.
Unfortunately, writer’s block doesn’t work like that. It’s not about writing. It’s about knowing what you’re trying to write.
Curing Writer’s Block: Analysing The Problem
The second step to curing writer’s block is to, now we’ve realised the problem, analyse the problem.
Essentially, there’s probably a reason why you have nothing to say, or a reason why you can’t collect your thoughts into some sort of flow of written words.
It might be that you don’t know the subject well enough. (You might think you do, but it’s kind of like song lyrics. You don’t know how little you know them until you have to sing them without a prompt.)
It could be that you know all you need to, but you haven’t developed a plan or order in which the words are supposed to come out.
Possibly, you’ve got all the material and you know the order in which everything needs to appear, but you’re concerned about the actual words in terms of style, phrasing and whatnot.
Or it could be that you simply aren’t in the habit of writing. You sit in front of your computer and your first thought is, “Better see what’s going on over at Facebook.com” and then you’re lost.
You Can Solve All Of These Issues Easily… In Fact, You Might Have Already
Curing writer’s block is easy when you’ve identified the reason for the “blockage.”
For some of you, just categorising the different problems you’ve faced like I’ve done in the short sentences above will be enough to jog you into curing writer’s block for yourself.
Once you establish what the problem is, it’ll start to clear itself. Most people don’t even attempt to find out what’s causing them trouble or getting them down, so doing this will put you ahead of all the people that say, “That’s just the way it is… sometimes writer’s block happens.”
After you’ve diagnosed the issue, it’s a simple case of fixing the specific thing that’s getting in your way.
If you don’t know enough about your topic then you need to research it.
If you are out of the habit of writing, then you need to sit and write.
If planning is the issue, then plan.
If you think your idea is terrible, get another one or rethink the one you have.
Final Thoughts
This is a short topic… because curing writer’s block is quite simple.
You don’t need hundreds of different creativity exercises.
Taking up meditation or other mind-altering techniques are the long way around solving a short problem.
Work out what the issue is specifically and then fix it.
Other than that, the cure to writer’s block is to simply sit and write.
Get to it.