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What to do when you can’t write: some days the words won’t come. Four research-backed strategies to get them moving again.
Some days the words won’t come.
You sit down at the desk you tidied for the occasion. You open the file. The last paragraph you wrote now reads like somebody else wrote it, so you check your email instead because at least email arrives with words already in it.
I’ve coached writers for more than 25 years, and I can tell you this state is far more common than many writers admit, and it isn’t fatal.
But the usual advice, “push through,” is like telling a driver with a flat tire to press harder on the gas.
Here are four strategies that work.
1-Go for a walk
I know. Everyone says this, but almost nobody does it properly. Research explains why it works.
In 2014, Stanford researchers Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz ran people through creative-thinking tests, first sitting and then walking. Walking raised creative output by an average of 60 per cent. My favourite part: walking on a treadmill while facing a blank wall worked just as well as strolling across the leafy Stanford campus. The legs were doing the work, not the scenery.
Better still, the boost lingered: people who walked and then sat back down at a desk kept generating more ideas for a good stretch afterward.
So, leave your earbuds at home, along with the music, the podcast and the audiobook about productivity. Carry one question and nothing else. Something like: “What does my reader need to understand first?” Then walk for 20 minutes and let your brain chew on it.
And don’t feel you have to spend 100 per cent of your time thinking about your topic. Instead, let your mind wander. It’s in the wandering that you’ll find the most interesting creative ideas. You may end up spending as little as five per cent of your time thinking about your actual topic. That’s absolutely fine.
Oh, and bring your cellphone (but don’t listen to music). Ideas that arrive on a walk can vanish within minutes, and with your cellphone, you can dictate notes to yourself.
2-Write about why you can’t write
This sounds like navel-gazing, but researchers have tested it.
Psychologists Gerardo Ramirez and Sian Beilock published a study in Science in 2011 looking at students who froze during high-stakes exams. Before the test, one group spent 10 minutes writing about their worries. Those students scored better than the ones who sat there stewing, and the highly anxious ones nearly closed the gap on their calmer classmates.
Worry takes up room in your working memory. Put it on paper and you evict it.
Open a blank document and type, “I can’t write this chapter because…” Keep going for five minutes. What you’ll usually find is a decision you’ve been dodging. Maybe you don’t know who you’re writing for. Maybe you never settled what the paper is actually arguing.
Blocks disguise themselves as moods. Usually, they’re decisions you haven’t made yet.
3-Say it out loud to one person (even yourself)
Writing makes many of us self-conscious in a way that talking never does.
Pick a real human being. Your sister, say, or a former colleague. Open the voice recorder on your phone and explain the stuck part to them the way you would if you’d bumped into them in the grocery store. “So, the thing I’m trying to say is…”
Your speaking voice gets to the point in a hurry, and it skips the throat-clearing opening paragraph you have now rewritten nine times, each version slightly worse than the one before.
Then transcribe it. What comes out of your mouth won’t be finished prose, and some of it will be embarrassing, but it will be material, and material can be fixed.
4-Become a copycat
When Benjamin Franklin set out to teach himself to write, he took essays from The Spectator, jotted short notes on each one, put the original away for a few days, rebuilt the piece from his notes, then compared the two to see where he’d gone wrong. Hunter S. Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby so he could feel what those sentences were like from the inside.
You can do the five-minute version. Take one paragraph from a writer you admire and copy it, slowly enough that you notice where the commas fall. E.B. White is my go-to.
Your hand catches the rhythm before your head does, and when you turn back to your own page, you’re already moving. You’ve also outfoxed the blank screen, because you started your session by writing sentences you knew were good, even if they weren’t yours.
This isn’t plagiarism, by the way. You’re doing scales. Pianists practise them every day of their lives, and nobody accuses them of robbing Chopin. Check out my previous post on how to become a better copycat.
One rule that covers everything
Set a timer for five minutes.
On a day when writing feels impossible, your aim isn’t a finished chapter, it’s to prove that the machinery still turns over. A five-minute walk beats the 90-minute walk you never take, and five minutes of copying out somebody else’s sentences beats a whole morning spent glaring at your computer.
And if none of it works today? Shut the laptop and go make soup. Tomorrow is also a writing day, and you’ll be more use to your book after eight hours of sleep than after four more hours of misery at the keyboard.
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Something I’m loving right now…
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My video podcast last week addressed how to banish writing perfectionism. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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