Are you getting stuck with your writing? 5 ideas to move you forward
“The desire to write grows with writing.” ― Erasmus”
Have you gotten stuck with your writing? You are not alone. Anyone who has ever written anything has gotten stuck from time to time. Most of us have had the experience of needing to get something down and staring at a blank page with no ideas in mind.
Stress does that: it shuts down your prefrontal cortex and sends you into a mild panic even when you know missing a deadline is not life-threatening, just annoying and upsetting. In my own case, I can totally remember sitting down with pen and paper (yes, I am that old) attempting to write a book report, and staring at it for ages without putting anything down.
Given that experience and many others over the course of my lifetime, I thought I would offer up a few suggestions that have gotten me unstuck over the years.
1. Tell your inner critic to get out of the way
Your inner critic can take any number of forms, and cause you to get stuck with your writing. If you see it as a person, how about writing it a ticket or sending it to jail? If the critic takes the form of an object, how about hurling it into space or locking it away in a chest buried on a desert island? One client of mine put the inner critic in a railroad car and parked it in a switching yard.
You are never going to silence the inner critic forever, so don’t try. Know all the solutions to getting it out of the way are temporary and that’s OK. You only need to get the critic out of the way for a little while to get on with your writing. If you want some direct help with this right now, check out my short YouTube video on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrRGplcQyiQ&t=20s
2. Step away from your computer
Go do something that is unrelated to your writing. I have had clients try horseback riding, rock climbing, singing lessons, food canning classes, attend open-air operas, work in community theater, take jewelry-making classes, and many other activities that have nothing directly to do with their academic writing.
Often just trying something new can get the writing unstuck. Because doing a new and different activity sometimes leads to unexpected insight, I call this process “cross-fertilization.” For more on the topic, see my chapter Rebecca Pope-Ruark’s new book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal (in press).
3. Try writing in a different voice or in a different style
How would you tell your story if you scripted it for the big screen or imagined it as a one-person play? Does it change if you write it as a narrative poem? What if it is simply letters to a friend instead of a thesis and a defense? What if you wrote your ethnographic study as a novel?
Words recorded in participant observation interviews or other conversations with informants may suddenly look very different when trying to construct a believable dialogue. You might find it surprising what rises to the surface to grab your attention. Academic writers can particularly benefit by writing outside their narrowly defined style.
Even if the writing must return to a drier format later, you might have created more creative non-fiction.
4. Let go of waiting for big blocks of time
You are never going to have big blocks of time, no matter how much you try to plan for it.
Big blocks of writing time is a myth we tell ourselves
I set aside an entire Friday recently to write, and what happened? There was an ice storm and the internet went down. Not great when I really needed to look up a few things to see if I was actually being accurate in my interpretation. When the internet finally came back up, I had about 100 new emails. Granted, I could delete the vast majority, but it still took time to read them and deal with the ones that were time-sensitive. So much for several uninterrupted focused hours to write.
Try writing 15 minutes a day
It’s far better to stick to the 15 minutes a day rule. Just get that writing squashed in somewhere, and if you have time or feel like you have more to say, just keep going past those 15 minutes. Writing 15 minutes a day helps keep your subject top of mind and makes it easier to pick up without reconstructing your original thought process. As long as you know the next thing you are planning to say, you can write in small increments at any time.
Remember the 17…54…157 research results
In one of Robert Boice’s many research studies, all untenured faculty participants took part in the same writing workshop. After the workshop, the control group did what they had always done and waited for big blocks of time to write. On average, they wrote 17 pages a year. The next group wrote for 15-30 minutes every day and recorded their daily progress. On average they wrote 54 pages of text a year, about 3 times as much. The final group wrote for 15-30 minutes every day, recorded their daily writing progress, and checked in with someone about their progress at least every other week. They wrote 157 pages a year on average. Developing a daily writing practice really makes a difference.
5. Get a writing coach
Writing coaches can be invaluable. Coaches are both cheerleaders and accountability partners. They can help make amorphous deadlines real. They can help you keep going when you are feeling like “I just don’t care anymore. I’m tired of doing this.” A good coach can give you visualizations to help with writer’s block. A coach can be a great sounding board when you are going around in circles, unclear about what you are trying to say, and get you to focus your major arguments. Not to mention working with a coach can lessen the feelings of isolation a lot of writers have.
If you still feel you are stuck with your writing schedule a free 20-minute session with Hillary.
Tags: academia, academic, academic writing, goal setting, writing
Really appreciate your post about being stuck while attempting to write — and I especially value your tips for gaining traction!
Countless times, my brain has twisted for hours (even days) trying to conjure up just the right dramatic, eye-catching and memorable words to start off a report, speech, review, article, term paper or book. Unfortunately, this has often turned my love of writing into a torturous process — while building anxiety for missing deadlines.
While you point to “pen and paper” as being relics of the past, I recall Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” advising readers to dispense with computer keyboards and, instead, to use pen and paper while recording their daily stream-of-consciousness thoughts in an exercise she dubbed, “The Morning Pages.” Perhaps she thought the brain-to-paper path made for a purer, more objective writing experience.
When you mention the option of seeking out a writing coach, what kinds of qualifications might we look for when selecting one?
Thank you again for your terrific post!
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your comments. You are right about pen and paper, there is good evidence to show that connected pen to paper helps connections in the brain, though no one seems to know quite why that works. Morning pages has worked for a lot of my clients, even when they only write one instead of three. When looking for a writing coach, you need to consider whether you really need an editor or do you really need a motivator?
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