Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research, FACULTY OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES, IAS, County South, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK.   Tel: +44 (0) 1524 592224   E-mail: Kate Horsley

• VRT Home Page
• Graduate School Home
• Prospective Postgrads
• FASS Courses
• Funding and Finance
• Staff & Student ProfilesResearch Training Programme
• Announcements, News & Events
• Resources
• IT support

Writer’s Block

1  Some reasons for writer's block

2  Suggestions for overcoming writer's block

3  Other useful sites and further reading

Exercise 1  Why is writing difficult?

Exercise 2  How can one tackle the problem?

‘Whatever meaning different writers attach to it [i.e. writer’s block], it is a term we recognise.   Anecdotally, it seems to be the term most often used for the acute problems with generating text.  It is also the one most feared – by any writer – and, perhaps the most difficult to resolve . . . In fact, the term ‘writer’s block’ may be a term that people latch on to in order to explain why they are not writing; in the absence of a more precise definition, they resort to this term as a kind of catch-all’.  Rowena Murray, How to Write A Thesis (Open University Press, 2002), pp.163-71.

Some reasons for writer’s block

Here is a compilation of the reasons for writer's block put forward by postgraduate students taking the 'Developing Thesis Writing Skills' course in previous years:

• Not having any ideas

• Not having any confidence in your ideas

• Not having a hypothesis (or having lost confidence in it)

• Not knowing who you are writing for

• Feeling inferior to whom you are writing for

• Fear of failure / criticism

• Not having developed your own ‘voice’

• Having gathered too much material

• Getting lost in an argument and not knowing a way out

• Moving your material around too much

• Getting’ burned out’

• Feeling there is still a long way to go (e.g., at end of first draft)

• Not believing your work is up to the ‘standard’

• The absence of deadlines

• Receiving criticism from your supervisor and / or others

 

Many of the same sorts of reasons were put forward by students whose views were canvassed by the advisors preparing Harvard Bureau of Study Counsel's 'Overcoming Procrastination' - 'writer's procrastination' being an alternative, perhaps slightly less palatable, way of conceptualising the problem.

 

• Lack of relevance. If something is neither relevant nor meaningful to you personally, it may be difficult to get motivated even to begin.

• Acceptance of another’s goals. If a project has been imposed or assigned to you and it is not consistent with your own interests, you may be reluctant to spend the necessary time to see it to conclusion.

• Perfectionism. Having unreachable standards will discourage you from pursuing a task. Remember, perfection is unattainable.

• Evaluation anxiety. Since others’ responses to your work are not under your direct control, overvaluing these responses can create the kind of anxiety that will interfere with work getting accomplished.

• Ambiguity. If you are uncertain of what is expected of you, it may be difficult to get started.

• Fear of the unknown. If you are venturing into a new realm or field, you don’t have any way of knowing how well you’ll do. Such an uncertain outcome may inhibit your desire to begin.

• Inability to handle the task. If through lack of training, skills, or ability you feel that you lack the personal resources to do the job, you may avoid it completely.

 

 

Suggestions for overcoming writer’s block

 

EXERCISE TWO: How can one tackle the problem? Before reading the following suggestions for overcoming writer's block, make two lists:  • in the first list, try to put the possible causes of your writer's block in order, starting with the things that seem to you easiest to deal with and working your way towards the factors that generate the most anxiety.  • in the second list, alongside each cause, jot down a couple of things that you think might help to overcome the problem.  Then go on to read the suggestions made by other students.

Discussions amongst Lancaster postgraduate students about ways of overcoming the psychological and cognitive obstacles involved in writer's block produced the following list of possible remedies:

• Use your writing as a means to address the problem; make that the subject of your discussion

• Re-connect with your central hypothesis or devise a new one

• Finish writing at a point where it will be easy to pick up tomorrow

• Be prepared to abandon cul-de-sacs in your argument

• Find a voice / level of ‘jargon’ in which you  are comfortable

• Think carefully about your audience and your relationship with them; how can you improve this?

• Get informal feedback from people other than your supervisor in order to boost your confidence

• Try out your arguments verbally with friends

• Use free-writing to sort our ideas or reconnect you with the project

• Be prepared to go back to the drawing board and abandon chapters if they are really not working

• When re-writing, extract and analyse the criticisms one by one; try not to get overwhelmed

• Try to find a way of connecting the criticisms with your own ideas

• Minimize your notes and other material when you start writing

• Plan, but don’t overplan

• Don’t expect to get it right first time (see Peter Elbow’s chapter on this in Writing with Power, 1998)

 

There are now several internet sites (see below) that give advice on overcoming writer's block, all of them offering a similar core of sugestions.  So, for example, the University of Pennsylvania Office of Learning Resources offers students a document called 'Battling the Block: Writing through and beyond writer’s block'.  The following list is a summary of their suggested strategies, which as you will see overlap to a considerable extent with the list arrived at by Lancaster students:

• Let things incubate – use time spent waiting / walking / engaged in routine tasks to think about your writing.  

• Represent your ideas visually – perhaps try to draw a concept map relating your ideas to one another, or diagram in different coloured marker pens on a sheet of A4.  This can bring connections to the fore, and can also reveal weaknesses or gaps in your structure or logic.

• Verbalize your thoughts – try talking through your ideas with a friend or teacher; perhaps ask them to take notes for you; alternatively, talk into a tape recorder and play your ideas back to yourself.  This can help to generate ideas and can lead you towards making new connections. 

• Change your audience – one of the most commonly mentioned anxieties is the audience you imagine reading what you have written: experiment with writing for a quite different audience, perhaps for a completely non-academic audience (your mother, your friend, your pet); explain your ideas more casually and informally, and then only later on think about revising them for a more academic readership.

• Freewrite – research students often feel weighed down by the sheer amount of material they are trying to synthesise:  try closing all of your books and just writing whatever comes into your mind; in the first instance, just write about anything, however irrelevant to the task in hand; then, once you’ve started the flow of words on the page, you might begin to think about the topic you want to discuss, but still with as little internal censorship as possible.  

• Use a model of good writing – as the Pennsylvania advice sheet says, “modeling is a powerful rhetorical strategy.”  Read the work of a writer you like, and then try using language in the same way, imitating their sentence structure, vocabulary, syntax, etc. 

Other useful sites and further reading

Online:

The Owl at Purdue:  'Writer's Block / Writer's Anxiety'

University of Guelph Learning Services:  'Controlling Procrastination'

The Writing Center, University of North Carolina: links to 'Procrastination' and 'Writing Anxiety'

About.com: Fiction Writing:  'Top 10 Tips for Overcoming Writer's Block'

Transaction Net:  'Dissolving Writer's Block'

Writing-World.com:  'Fighting Writer's Block' (and links to related articles)

Bibliography:

Glatzer, Jenna, Outwitting Writers' Block: And Other Problems of the Pen (The Lyons Press, 2004)

Hjortshoj, Keith, Understanding Writing Blocks (Oxford University Press, 2001)

Nelson, Victoria, Writer's Block and How to Use it (Writer’s Digest Books, 1985)

Palumbo, Dennis, Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within (John Wiley & Sons, 2000)

Peterson, Karen E., Write: 10 Days to Overcoming Writer's Block, Period (Adams Media Corporation, 2006)

Rekulak, Jason, The Writer's Block: Ideas to Jump-start Your Imagination (Running Press, 2001)

Weissberg, Robert and Suzanne Buker, Writing Up Research (Prentice Hall Regents, 1990)

© Lynne Pearce, 2006