Guaranteed: An End to Writer’s Block

At school I loved to write and my teachers thoroughly encouraged me and I figured that some day I would write a book but I chose to study engineering and the demand for creative writing dissipated. I still read a lot of fiction and came up with ideas and the idea of becoming an author still simmered away in the background. After many years I realised that if I was to ever take that idea from mere wishful thinking through to fulfilment of the desire that I would actually have to sit down and write something. I had an idea for a book that I wanted to write about a period of my youth when I had a wild time and that I wanted to capture for my own sake and so I quit work, took off for Spain, holed up in a small apartment in Seville and got down to writing.

High Productivity Habit

I didn’t know much about the process of consistent writing. I had only one piece of information to enlighten me and to keep me going. I had read a long time before about a Victorian writer named Anthony Trollope in a book about time management. He was given as an example of a prolific writer who published far more than his average contemporaries. The surprising thing was that he only wrote for two-hours a day but he did this consistently, day-in and day-out, year after year and it was this habit that allowed him to have such a prodigious output. I thought to myself, “Even I can do two-hours a day of writing.”

I set myself the objective of writing for either two-hours straight or to complete a minimum of 2-pages of writing with MS-Word (A4 size, which equates to about 3-pages of a standard novel). This was such a relatively simple task that I did it day-in and day-out for 4-months until I had a 350-page book written. I had achieved my objective of writing a book (I never set the objectives of editing it or attempting to get it published – I was more interested to see if I had, or could develop, the capability to write a book).

How I Overcame Writer’s Block

It wasn’t completely plain sailing. I had to learn to overcome writer’s block and in the end I developed an easy method to do so. I found that if I sat down to a blank sheet of paper, or a blank screen, and expected to reel off pages and pages of excellent writing that I got nowhere. I ended up fully blocked. After some experimentation I figured out that the block came for two primary reasons:

1) Lack of preparation prior to writing

2) Mixing functions that require different thinking processes

I began to realise that the process of writing has distinct functions with each requiring a different mindset. I found that the process of imaginative creativity very different to the process of describing things through writing and that those processes were very different to the one of making decisions over content, quality and style. If I attempted to mix the functions and to carry them out all at once then I found myself struggling as I wrestled simultaneously with the processes of planning, guidelines, preparation, creativity and the writing itself. By breaking these functions down into separate parts and focusing on each one it turn I was able to use my brain to best effect and I removed the struggle and blockage and more readily freed up my abilities to write flowingly.

In the beginning I needed to think about the overall content of the book, the style of writing, the themes that I wanted to develop and pursue, the balance between prose, dialogue, humour, pathos, description and inference. This thinking created guidelines over what and what not to include and how to describe things. Thus, when I came across a point of uncertainty about how to proceed I could refer to my overall guidelines for consistency, which normally made otherwise sticky decisions much easier to make.

In the end, based up Trollope’s work practice and my own ideas on separating the functions of the process I developed the following daily procedure: In the afternoon or evening I would think about what I wanted to write about the next day. I would then create a ‘skeleton’ for the writing, which was often little more than a list of salient points that I wanted to include with some thought about the organisation of them so that I would write about them in a logical format. As I thought through this process I began to create the images that I wanted to describe with my writing. As I went through this process some specific points would come to the fore, which I would notate in detail to capture them. This began to flesh out the skeleton. The imagination and organisation involved produced the essential creativity required and this thought exercise allowed for a lot of experimentation in the mind in a quick and easy fashion. I could let my mind wander and investigate ideas that might lead to dead-ends with little effort or frustration.

I would sketch out enough to give me sufficient to work with for my two-hours writing stint and then I would leave it and get on with other things and then sleep on it. The following morning I would arise early and would normally get to work immediately on the writing. Because I had already done the creative and organisational aspects already the writing flowed easily as, in effect, I just explained with rich and interesting detail what I had imagined the day before. With this process, which separated the creativity and experimentation from the process of writing an explanation, I never ever had writer’s block.

As another way to think of it, imagine that someone asked you to tell a new and imaginative fairytale on the spot. You would probably falter, stutter, hesitate, pause, scratch your head and generally struggle your way through it as you attempted to create on the spot whilst explaining it simultaneously. You might come to a complete stop, which would be ‘speaker’s block’. If someone asked you to create a new tale and tell it the following day then you could think through the tale properly and create it well and even practice the telling of it. Then when you give the performance you can do it masterfully and entertainingly.

Writing for a Blog

All of the things that I discovered about the process of writing apply equally to writing blog articles.

• Overall Guidelines. We begin with the overall guidelines about our niche topics, our target audience, the kind of information that we want to convey, the style of writing and so on. The effort that we put into defining these guidelines makes subsequent decision making about what is appropriate and what is not very easy.
• Idea and Purpose. If we are clear about the purpose of our blog then ideas come relatively easily. Just keep asking yourself the question, “What do I want to convey to my readers that will prove useful to them?”
• Structure. Having a ready made ‘skeleton’ helps to flesh out ideas into fully formed articles much more easily and makes it more likely that you will fulfil the purpose behind the article. I use the following skeleton if I get stuck (but I don’t always follow it exactly).
  • Introduction
  • Effect
  • Cause
  • Reasoning
  • Method
  • Application
  • Benefits
  • Summary
• Editing Guidelines. Sometimes editing the article proves more difficult than the writing of it. This is because we can often get lost in the detail of what we have written. Referring back to the overall guidelines can help regain clarity and I ask the following questions to avoiding succumbing to perfectionist tendencies:
  • Is the article sufficiently comprehensive?
  • Does it convey expertise and competence?
  • Do I say anything that I cannot prove?
  • Do I say anything that can readily be disputed?
  • Is anything about this article going to make me feel embarrassed later?

Basically, plenty of thought and preparation will make the actual writing, editing and posting of articles a cinch because you do so much of the creativity and decision making needed in advance. You end up transforming what seemed “impossible to do in the moment” into “easily possible to do in the moment” and as a result ‘writer’s block’ vanishes.

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