My entire perspective on "writer's block" shifted after surreptitiously stumbling on Jerry Weinberg's book "The fieldstone method". I very rarely now start with a blank page and very rarely beat myself up for "writer's block".<p>In a nutshell, the book describes how the act of writing can be broken down into many stages: sometimes you are collecting "fieldstones" (i.e. research), sometimes you editing, and sometimes you are synthesizing. Regardless, there's always <i>something</i> to do that moves you forward.<p>* Field stone method - <a href="https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/On_Writing.html" rel="nofollow">https://geraldmweinberg.com/Site/On_Writing.html</a>
Sometimes, you're just exhausted, have too much going on in life and need to take care of yourself. Your mind and body aren't separate. If you are ill, not getting enough sleep, recently had a death in the family, etc, you may just have "nothing to say" until some of that is resolved.<p>Other times, your relationship to your audience has changed. Maybe you/your life changed and that changes your relationship to everything else. Maybe your audience grew and you are getting different feedback than what you used to get or things went places you didn't expect. Now you need time to digest that info and decide how best to adjust what you are doing.<p>Sometimes "taking a break" isn't really a break. Sometimes it's working hard on something like one of the two above issues so your writing will be better.
I find that the “two minute rule” works pretty well.<p>Whatever you want to do, set a timer for two minutes. Hit start and do that thing for two minutes and really beleive that after two minutes you can stop.<p>Once you get going you rarely stop after two minutes. But telling your brain only twos minutes, and let’s see what happens, kind of let’s your brain give you two minutes to focus.<p>Oh, and go write without a computer. Get a pen and paper and leave ur phone on your desk - go somewhere else. You get to sit there and either write or do nothing. That tends to help too.
Off-topic, but I was reminded of the brilliant (and much shorter) paper <i>The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer's Block”</i>, full text here:<p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/?page=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1311997/?page=1</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unsuccessful_self-treatment_of_a_case_of_%22writer%27s_block%22" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_unsuccessful_self-treatmen...</a>
I only write about things I have intimate knowledge of. Writing about anything I don't have a deep interest in feels forced and contrived. I follow this saying when writing:<p><pre><code> I don't write because I want something to say, I write because I have something to say</code></pre>
I mentioned my personal solution for this in another recent post, but it's worth restating:<p>Close your eyes, start typing. Alternately, turn off the monitor. Just start. Type anything. Get words on the page. Brain dump. Edit later.<p>There's nothing worse than a blank page!
Claim: Writer's block is just a challenge that any profession or activity would face - getting stuck. I get stuck writing software or learning piano or vacuuming my house. Convince me otherwise please. I want to learn what's different about this "Writer's block" that people keep talking about.
people said stuff like these help sometimes:
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies</a>
Jim Butcher, the author of Dresden Files, mentioned recently on reddit how he starts to get around mental blocks by concentrating on just getting the body moving:
<a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/iekfx9/im_jim_butcher_author_of_the_dresden_files_ama/g2i8g3f" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/iekfx9/im_jim_butc...</a>
Working on solving writer’s block at copy.ai using GPT-3. We’ll be launching tools specifically for writers soon. Some of our users have already mentioned to us that our current tools solved their writers block. I suspect we might be underestimating the impact of a huge stochastic language model on human communication.