My own biggest writing blocks

I like helping people with their writer’s blocks. I have them sometimes.

The biggest kind of writer’s block I get is when I feel divorced from a sense of faithfulness. This is different from love, and from care, and from hopes around being helpful.

It is a hard feeling to describe. The writer’s block feels something like hopelessness around the feeling I am writing from having longevity — like that the feeling will disappear and stop feeling relevant — like it wasn’t a real feeling to be writing from. Often this feeling is sturdy, but it can be threatened.

I have had a lot of tricks over the years to deal with this feeling. More recently, writing every day has been helpful — this is an antidote to changing emotions and to mixed-up moods. Seeing which ideas “come back” across different moods and therefore feel more evergreen has also been helpful.

But the tricks that I use to mentor people, and the tricks I use myself are different from looking at the blocks. “What is a trick to get around this?” is a different question from “What is this?”

Often, I get this kind of writing block when I have done enough work on a writing project to realize how much work, despite my work, is still left ahead of me. Then the questions around if I am invested enough start to come up, and I get this writer’s block around faithfulness. A vision and set of emotions that helped guide you when something was of a certain difficulty, can change when the difficulty changes — and then if those emotions move, can I remember the point, and what was guiding me in the first place?

In some ways this is cowardice. In some ways the cowardice is not trivial. If something takes a long time to do, the question of “am I willing to die, doing this” comes up, if the duration of time needed to complete the project looks longer than what you are able to foresee. Most people cannot foresee very far ahead, and most people know they can die very suddenly, from all sorts of things. I think the feeling of dread, and the feeling of “what if I drop this and do something else entirely” can be evolutionarily useful feelings.

To this, there are a few answers. “I want this experience of writing to transform me” is one answer. “The writing is not hard, that thinking about the writing and doing the writing are not much different from each other” is an answer. “I need to get this out of my head anyway” is another.

A trick like setting a clock for how much time you are willing to spend on your project is somewhat helpful, but only somewhat. It does not answer the other questions, and with something like writing, it really simply might not get done in the allocated time.

I think one way to go through this is to think about what you have already figured out. You are playing with the book in your head all the time. That is one advantage you might have, compared with something like painting, which you can also think about in your head, but it’s not the same. You want all the advantages of your medium.

There are probably parts of your work, that you are just not writing, even though you had already figured it out. It is stuck in that in-between-place of being already done, but not being shown. The experience has partially transformed you, thinking about and doing the writing are similar enough, but you don’t really want to think about it, and it’s already partially out of mind, and so there is no urgency in getting it out. The normal answers to “should I die doing this” are there, but not fully, and you can’t rotate out one partial answer for another.

The block here is not in the writing, it is in the looking at your own mind. But the good news is that because each of those listed three potential unblockers is messy somehow, in part due to completed work residing in your head, then there are ways that assuming you’d already done more work, or assuming you’d done less work, on any of those three quoted answers, can ublock you. You don’t need to unblock all three. Just getting one clear should make going forward without the weight of “will I die doing this” not seem particularly important anymore.