Getting Unstuck: A Solution to Writer’s Block

Has this ever happened to you? While driving or jogging or taking a shower, you find yourself writing in your head. Pithy and quotable sentences flow from you, seemingly without effort. You can hardly wait to get it all down. But when you finally open your word processor and see that cursor blinking at you expectantly, all the sentences in your head seem to vanish. Half an hour later, the cursor is still in the upper left hand corner, only now its blinking looks petulant and reproachful. You’re blocked.
            It might seem to you that the verbal portion of your brain has shut down entirely, but the real problem is that it’s busy doing something else. A host of anxieties and unanswered questions are vying for your attention, and won’t let you write until you give them a satisfactory answer. Here are some of the most common hang-ups:

Hope and Fear
Fantasies of accepting the Pulitzer Prize or appearing on Oprah alternate with dismal visions of rejection letters and remainder tables. Between your best case and worst case scenarios, you find little ground to stand on.

Publishing Anxiety
On behalf of the entire publishing industry, you pull a pre-emptive strike, rejecting your project before the first word of it has been written. If you can think of other, similar books, you assume the market is saturated and your book will be rejected for not being original. If you don’t know of any similar books, you assume it’s because your idea is bad and all other writers had better sense than to pursue it. True, these worries are contradictory. Blocked writers get themselves coming and going.

Stage Fright
Instead of writing the book, your inner critic is busy composing bad reviews. If you do manage to get anything down on the page, you pronounce it terrible. You’re probably right. First drafts are terrible. That’s why they’re called first drafts. Still, the contrast between the brilliant work in your imagination and those lame sentences on the page or screen can be very dispiriting.

Lack of Structure
You probably learned in school that you’re supposed to start with an outline. In real life, trying to make an outline only serves to convince you that you truly don’t know what form the work should take. So instead you decide to just dive in. Writer’s block sets in later, when you look over what you’ve done so far and realize it’s a baggy, shapeless mess.

Beginning at the Beginning
The trouble here is that the beginning, as most writers conceive of it, is the most boring part. You figure that you should start by defining your terms (yawn), or giving a brief history of your topic (yawn), or explaining to the reader why your topic is important (ho-hum). None of this is what you’re really interested in saying.

Never face a blank page

My solution to writer’s block is simple: eliminate the blank page. How? We use worksheets to address in advance all the questions and worries that are bound to crop up during the writing. They break every phase of the project down into manageable steps, and every problem into answerable questions. The beauty of worksheets is that there’s already something written on them. You’re not starting from absolute scratch. Here’s what the step-by-step process looks like.

1. Express your hopes and fears
The first worksheet prompts you clarify your goals for the work and identify your best case, worst case and most likely scenarios.

2. Develop your idea
This might seem too obvious to need doing, but I find that some authors get stuck because they have many different ideas that can’t coexist comfortably in a single article or book. This phase helps you identify the idea that has the most juice for you, and the book you are uniquely suited to write.

3. Know your audience
Instead of trying to appeal to the faceless masses, you develop a precise description of your ideal reader, and spell out why that person would prefer your book to all of its competitors. Most of my clients find this step difficult, but worth it. When marketing and publishing anxieties come up later in the project—as they are bound to do—you have a concise and credible response to them, in writing.

4. Know your genre
A genre is a formula for satisfying reader expectations. Romance, sci-fi and coming-of-age stories are examples of fiction genres. In non-fiction, genres don’t always have obvious names, but nearly every book falls into one. Once you identify the genre for your projected work, you can pick a successful example to serve as a template. You’ll find that most decisions about structure and style are already made for you. You’ll also greatly enhance your chances of being accepted by a publisher.

5. Plan your article/chapter
Instead of outlining, a worksheet prompts you to answer a series of questions from the reader’s point of view. When you sit down to write (or your collaborator sits down to write for you), what to say and how to say it couldn’t be clearer. You’ve already been “interviewed” on the topic, and can start by quoting yourself.

This might sound like a lot of steps to go through before settling down to write the book itself. But if you’re stuck, it’s a much more productive way to spend your time than staring at the blinking cursor. When you finally do embark your project, a folder full of completed worksheets makes you feel like you’ve got the situation well in hand—because you do!

You can download the chapter worksheet from the Free Stuff section.