Beating Writer’s Block

You are staring at a blank Word document until your eyes hurt, trying to figure out what to write.

“It has to be great,” you mumble to yourself. But it isn’t great, because it doesn’t exist. Suddenly your deadline looms in the distance, and you panic. You start to type, and you tell yourself that the finished product isn’t going to be good. So how does it turn out? Bad. We’ve all experienced the agony.

That agony is, as you probably know from the title of this post, writer’s block. You don’t have to be a writer to understand what it’s like to suffer from a lack of inspiration—we all experience it in every field. So what is writer’s block, and how does one overcome it? The answer is surprisingly simple. 

Permit yourself to write badly 

Fear of writing something terrible is the source of 90% of writer’s block. People tell themselves that what they put on the blank page has to be nothing short of excellent. Well, guess what? It won’t be remarkable—because it’s a rough draft. Nobody can write a perfect draft on their first try—those who say they do, are liars. 

Accept the fact that what you write will be imperfect, and you will free yourself from the clutches of writer’s block. When you do that, you will come to see that it’s not a phenomenon but a state of mind. You can’t get started because you won’t allow yourself to get started. 

Just start writing

Still don’t know what to write? Just start bashing-out sentences with your keyboard! Create something—anything! If it’s an assignment on a topic, write about that. The sentences don’t even have to relate to each other; however, they should connect to whatever you want your blank document to reflect once finished. When you start to write and let your mind flow and work-through ideas, you will see that something will begin to take shape. 

Write however much you can, then stop! Look at what you’ve written over a page or two, and start to edit. Search for ideas, angles you can take, etc. Once you’ve done that, erase the useless stuff, and go from there.  

True perfection comes from editing

Many people don’t seem to understand that editing and revision are what makes content genuinely great. This process allows you to make a bad first draft and turn it into something decent. Once you have that, your take that work, edit it again, and that good work becomes great work. Revise something enough times, with skill and understanding, and you could be looking at a masterpiece. But that masterpiece had to exist in a rough form first—because that’s how things are. 

Humans have gotten to their place in the world as the top species via trial and error. We attempt something, learn from how it went badly, correct, and make the next attempt better. It would be best if you were approaching your written work the same way. Create something bad! Nobody is going to see it. Authors don’t send their first drafts to their publishers and demand that that be printed. No, the book you take off the shelf is there after a long, strenuous process of correcting and re-correcting. But that process was only able to happen because somebody somewhere permitted themselves to write a bad first draft. Somebody somewhere didn’t allow writer’s block to control them.