Dealing With Writer's Block

Even after 3 years of writing for a living, I’m still experiencing writer’s block. Writing 200 words a day has become easy, but I’m still struggling with writing more long-form content. Once in a while, I re-evaluate my approach to writing. 

I take the first step by acknowledging I have a procrastination problem, but what am I concretely going to do about it?

The root of the issue is quite clear to me: my expectations are too high―I’m forgetting to have fun and enjoy the process itself. What excites me about writing? It’s about being understood. It’s about solving problems with words. If I can identify the problems, I can find an answer to them.

Problems resonate with first principles: ideas, emotions, and behaviors we can all relate to. Writing is a quest for these truths. When you get a glimpse of them, you have to show them to the readers instead of merely telling them. 

Sitting down to start scribbling down some words is an iterative process: something you put on paper can give you another idea to research and integrate in your draft. 

I often forget what matters is immersing myself in the moment to make it enjoyable. I find offline writing to be efficient at creating the right environment to focus on the craft. The time I earn typing faster is useless if my inspiration runs dry. Inspiration emerges from a blank state of mind, which is more easily attained when I am offline and away from distractions.

I read about Robert Greene’s note taking method and it gave me an idea for my writing process. Outlining is great, but was if I could think of an article in terms of mind-maps? Outlining presupposes you already know the best logical plan to paint a solution, but during editing your outline is constantly changing. You need the flexibility to seamlessly re-arrange ideas. It echoes to what I wrote in Atomic Writing: every sentence is an atomic idea, your corpus is a molecule of ideas. The writing process should take that into account. If my mind becomes too rigid following an outline, I feed my writer’s block. On the contrary, if I remain open to new ideas and structures, I gain access to an inexhaustible manna.

I always pressure myself into respecting deadlines, which can be deadly in itself too. I have to re-learn to take easy, 200 words at a time.

More importantly, like The War of Art’s author Steven Pressfield declares, I can only fight Resistance by showing up every day. Writing a lot and writing well are both habits that take years of work to develop. I cannot realistically expect myself to succeed right away, but I must still try not to fail.