Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist — You’re Procrastinating
By: Mieke Van Der Merwe
Tags: Inspiration, Freelancing, Productivity, Procrastination, Writing

Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist — You’re Procrastinating

A five-step guide to writing more

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” — Pablo Picasso

As someone who writes a lot (and often fails to write a lot), I know the struggle. You don’t make progress on your writing projects. It seems like each time you have a great idea, you don’t have time to write. Yet each time you have some free time, you struggle to be productive.

Perhaps you’re waiting for inspiration to strike before you sit down and put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.

I call bullshit. So did Picasso. He once famously said, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

I tend to agree with Picasso. Not only because I have the best ideas for stories and blogs when I’m working on something else (although that is certainly true and very annoying at times), but because you can’t truly engage with the problem you’re trying to solve if you’re not giving it your full attention.

By “problem,” I mean the dozens of tiny decisions that go into writing. The hundreds of questions you need to answer in order to progress from a blank page to something people actually enjoy reading and derive value from. What will your character do when they find out that their lover has been unfaithful? Which word will you use to describe the scent of the air? How will you explain that difficult technical concept in the how-to guide you’ve been commissioned to write?

While you can muse about these problems in an abstract, high-level way while you’re in the shower or taking a walk or making your third cup of coffee, you can’t really solve them unless you’re sitting in front of your computer or notebook (or typewriter, if you have to be an absolute hipster about it). Only once you glue your butt to your chair and dive into the page can you start making real progress.

I don’t mean the “make a few notes and do some online research and then watch six YouTube videos” kind of progress either. That’s procrastinating too.

I know it well. It feels productive. It’s not. Not if you were planning to actually write. Unless your writing session produced actual writing, it wasn’t a writing session, sorry.

Be honest with yourself. If it’s not a writing session, call it something else. Deciding upfront that this is a research or ideation or editing session will make this process much easier by taking away the pressure to write. I’m willing to bet (based on my own experience) that if you go into your session with the intent to only do research or make notes or revise your draft, you’ll soon find yourself alive with ideas and itching to write.

But if you go in with the intention to write and end up going down a Reddit hole, you’ll not only make little progress on your writing, you’ll probably feel guilty and demoralized afterward.

So call it what it is. Tell yourself, “I’m going to do some research into human nature on Reddit for 30 minutes and then write for 30 minutes.” Time the research, but not the writing (unless you have somewhere you need to be later). Keeping track of the time you spend preparing to write is important because it’s so easy for it to feel like writing. It’s very easy to fall into the research trap, convincing yourself that you don’t know enough to write what you need to write yet.

I call bullshit. Unless the topic you’re writing is incredibly technical, the chances are you already know most of what you need to know to write it — or at least write an outline. Once you have the outline, the rest practically writes itself.