How to beat writer’s block

Despite the nice SEO title, I’m not sure there’s anything especially honest in offering a cure for writer’s block. Being blocked is a natural part of the writing process; it’s ‘organic’, if you like that term. In my experience, it can even preface a flood of creativity.

Still, writer’s block is frustrating, and upgrades itself to unpleasant if it strikes at a time you really need it not to. (The anxiety about being blocked, not just ‘being blocked’, dishes out the real carnage.) So, here are some of the writing strategies I adopt to stop it starting… or if it’s already started, to chase it away.

How to Overcome Writer’s Block

1.When I feel the fluidity start to fail, the first thing I do is grab a pen and paper and walk. Down the high street, in the park… wherever. I just keep walking until it flows back. (Cycling can be even better, though I’ve yet to find the best spot to stash a biro.) Apparently there is some scientific basis to this method; all I know is that it works for me. I’ve left the house with a blank sheet of paper and a blank mind where my dazzling copy ought to be. Two miles later and I’ve done the first draft and am three-quarters of the way to my invoice.

2. If every day were made up of chunks of 8 until 10 am, I’d have written as many books as Stephen King by now. It’s my brain’s most productive time. So: Work out your best times, and write through them without a break—and with your router switched off. When time’s up, snap the laptop lid and do something else. I try and clear the decks (and/or the kids) for a free run at my prime-time.

3. I read about professional writers who ‘never write fewer than x,000 words each day’. If that works for them, great. But it doesn’t work for me, so I don’t tighten the pressure-spiral by trying to learn it. At the end of a writing day, I know whether or not I’ve spent my time usefully without such a simplistic metric. It’s not always about the bottom line, even if I’ve been down a ridiculous lateral sidetrack and written almost nothing.

4. Watch out for cabin fever: sometimes I just need a change of environment. A co-working space works for me, and costs very little—I take the minimum tariff at The Hub. Because I often write in a small room, and in silence, when I’m co-working I go to the other extreme. I work in the café bit, not the office-like upstairs. The noise and space shock my brain into cooperation.

5. But if you really can’t write today, don’t beat yourself up about it. Read some Tolstoy or (for torrents of wordiness) some Ellroy, watch a DVD, or take yourself out to the Soane and make like a tourist for the afternoon. There’s nothing worse than reaching the end of the day to find you’ve achieved nothing bar staring at the 17-inch and aborting 32 different paragraphs. That just feeds the anxiety—and you don’t have to play along.

(I’m grateful to a tangentially-related conversation with @Twiverpool for setting these ideas on their way to concrete. The nostalgic photo is c/o StarbuckGuy… though writing with a pen makes my hand hurt these days.)