Recovering from Writer’s Block
by Candace Schaefer, Associate Director
I suppose that we’ve all experienced the feeling at one time or another: the immobilizing fear that comes from not writing when we are supposed to be writing. I am in my seventh year of Ph.D. study, and I have watched many of my peers graduate and move on while I am still mired in what I would call sporadic yet chronic writer’s block. I finished my coursework with ease, but when faced with the proposal and the dissertation, I found myself making stutter starts and lots of stops. I was making progress, but not at the pace I wanted, and I was spending more time worrying about not writing than actually writing.
What is ironic and a bit sad is that I’m a writer and a writing teacher by profession. In fact, I spend a great deal of my time teaching other people how to write. I have helped graduate students complete their literature reviews while I struggled to complete my own. My block made me feel like a fraud in my professional life, and feelings of inadequacy only made writing more difficult.
However, the problem wasn’t that I wasn’t writing at all or that I lacked the confidence or ability to write. In fact, I was writing everything except what I should have been writing. I finished a journal article and a proposal for a textbook while I was supposed to be working on my dissertation proposal and literature review. I wrote conference papers and reviewed the works of others.
From time to time, however, I would run into former classmates who were also having trouble writing. Faced with reality, we’d commiserate over our mired status and make excuses. Just when I thought that I’d never figure out what was wrong with me, I picked up a small book that taught me how to think my way out of the mess I was in.
In Understanding Writing Blocks, Keith Hjortshoj explains that writing blocks occur when the writer thinks and does something that disturbs the flow from thinking to writing. Although Hjortshoj acknowledges that writing is a recursive, non-linear process, blocked writers often repeat tasks unnecessarily, such as researching or reading, and eventually find themselves in endless loops of activity. The writers are working very hard, but they are not writing. They are going about the business of writing, even to the point of revising sentences, but they are not making progress on their writing. They may feel that their writing is not good enough in draft form, or they may be reacting to criticism from professors that they did not expect.
In general, Hjorthoj posits that writers are most often blocked when they change levels or types of writing. It is at this point of transition that writers get lost in the enormity of a writing task or take on a topic that is too broad or too complex to articulate. They do not feel capable of taking on a new type of writing task or find that their writing skills do not seem to be transferable from one writing project to another. Hjortshoj suggests that blocked writers ask themselves the following questions:
- When and in what kind of writing did the block begin to occur?
- What other kinds of writing can you complete without so much difficulty, and why?
- Where, in the writing process, do you encounter a block?
- What kinds of activity surround the block? In other words, what are you doing up to the point at which you get stuck, and what do you do next?
- What ideas about writing, about yourself as a writer, or about audiences and standards, are associated with this problem?
When I asked myself these questions, I saw a lot of myself in Hjorthoj’s text. Furthermore, I was able to identify why I wasn’t writing. Often I thought I was done with a task, but when I took my completed work to my committee chair, she sent me back to rethink, revise or restructure something I had done. My committee chair would not have framed her directives as being major setbacks as much as expected revision tasks, but I was devastated. My work should have been perfect, and it wasn’t. Every time I had one of these self-imposed setbacks, I descended into a funk and avoided thinking or writing for days and weeks on end.
Right now I’m what I would call a blocked writer in recovery. I still have a long way to go to ensure that I don’t keep undermining my own success, but I also know now what triggers my blocks and have developed coping mechanisms to work around them.
I empathize with all of you reading this who are struggling with writer’s block, especially when people provide pithy or over simplistic advice like “Just do it!” as if writer’s block could be cured by an advertising slogan. And if you are ready to start trying to figure out why you can’t write when you really can, try asking yourself the questions that Hjorthoj poses. You may be pleasantly surprised that you had the answer all along.
