Writing about it - approach to writer’s block

You know that feeling when you feel like you’re gonna sneeze but then it never comes out? I sometimes feel like that with blog posts. I think I have a post coming out of me so I sit down to start writing. But nothing coherent comes out.

I recently joined a new writer group and we had a small discussion about this.

What I wrote there, verbatim:

When I run into a situation where I have a vague idea but writing it doesn't quite happen right away, I usually take my notebook and go to a pub to write about it (rather than write it) and that often helps move forward.

This happens to me more often than I’d wish. It’s unfortunate because when I sit down to write, I always hope it’ll be a smooth, flow-like state where my fingers dance on the keyboard, instructing letters to join the choreography on the screen, ending in something profound and beautiful.

When it happens, some kind of security mechanism inside me goes into effect. Alarms start to blare internally: “this thing is stuck, let’s not ever succeed in it”. No matter how many times I return to the one-sentence draft, it doesn’t seem to budge and move forward. The dreaded writer’s block.

I’ve learned one trick to make it flow again: rather than trying to write the blog post, I take my notebook, head over to the pub and write about it. I give up trying to advance the blog post itself but rather, I take a step back and write anything else about the topic. Like a detective solving a crime, I dissect the idea and interrogate it for clues.

My notebook is full of these notes where I just do a brain dump, move sub-ideas around and try to find better approaches than my failed one.

It really helps me find new structures, new ways to phrase it, new storytelling mechanics to make it interesting.

I really like how Rachael Cayley writes about writer's block:

When we diagnose ourselves as having writer’s block, we can start to believe that we aren’t currently able to write. If you find yourself with a sore leg, it may well be that avoiding walking is a sound strategy. If you find yourself unable to write, might it be a sound strategy to avoid writing? The answer to that question is almost always no. Not writing has little-to-no curative power, in my experience.

The writer’s block is a real problem but to get through it, you sometimes need to fool your brain into thinking you’re doing something else than actually writing something that advances your blocked work.