Why You're Not Writing

Writer's block is a symptom, not a disease

Before we get into the cheerful subject of writer’s block, some good news on my end—my debut novel was just longlisted yesterday for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. This is came at a good time for me psychologically, because I’ve been hustling and fretting and shaking down all my contacts on the publicity front, and then suddenly this great news came out of nowhere that I didn’t have to work for. (Aside from writing the book in the first place.)

I guess the lesson there is: if you put a lot of hard work in, something utterly unrelated to your hard work will eventually pay off!

Preorders are currently 20% off through McSweeney’s, and the novel is also available through some great indie bookstores including P&T Knitwear, Literati Bookstore, and Prologue Bookshop. (More to come, hopefully!)

Okay, onto the main event.

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Two weeks ago, I hosted a little ask-me-anything extravaganza in the comments section of this post. I wanted a better sense of what fiction writers are working on, struggling with, curious about.

I’ve ended up with enough newsletter topics to get me through the next year and a half. But I wanted to start with one that cropped up multiple times in the comments. Here’s a request from Sharon Silver:

I would appreciate more advice on how to sit one’s self down and write. That may be a stupid question because the only way to do it is to do it, I suppose. Still, anything that can help me bridge the gap between (a) wanting to have my writing done and (b) actually doing it would be helpful.

And here’s Nick Bechard:

I'd like to second the question about “bridging the gap” between wanting to write and actually working up the momentum to sit down and do the damn thing. Lately, it’s like something inside me is repulsed by (almost) everything I generate. Feels grinding.

This is something every writer struggles with. And as such, there’s a lot of advice out there about it. You can’t throw a stone on Substack without hitting a post called “How to Actually Finish Your Novel This Year” or “Here’s the Real Cure for Writer’s Block.” I’m sure that Sharon and Nick and everyone who has ever struggled with writer’s block (i.e. all writers) have come across the standard advice:

• create a daily routine

• tell yourself you’re just going to write just one sentence / one page / etc.

• tell yourself you’re just going to write for just fifteen minutes / one hour / etc.

• freewrite a shitty first draft

• set up external accountability / deadlines

• back up to the last spot in the story where you felt excited

• minimize distractions in your writing space

• write first thing in the morning

• write whenever works best for you

• sign up for my $600 masterclass on how to sit down and write

• sit down and write! you got this!

Some of that advice is sound, but when you’re actively in writing crisis, those chipper little life hacks become worthless. If posts about how to sit down and write actually worked, there wouldn’t be so many of them.

So what I’m going to try to do is talk through why you’re not writing. Because I believe “writer’s block” is a symptom, not a disease. And like “having a high fever,” the symptom can point to a number of different diseases, which all have different cures. Some of those cures counteract each other. You don’t want to start randomly grabbing pills off the shelf until you’ve figured out what you’re trying to treat.

Look at what Sharon says:

Anything that can help me bridge the gap between (a) wanting to have my writing done and (b) actually doing it would be helpful.

And compare it to what Nick says:

Lately, it’s like something inside me is repulsed by (almost) everything I generate. Feels grinding.

These sound like two completely different problems. Sharon can’t get herself to sit down and put words on the page. Nick is putting words on the page—he just doesn’t like those words.

If we give Sharon and Nick the same advice—“Just sit at your desk every morning for one hour and freewrite!”—it might solve Sharon’s problem, but it definitely won’t solve Nick’s.

So let’s tackle this topic medically. I’m your doctor, and you’re telling me that you can’t make yourself sit down and write. Okay. Let’s figure out what other symptoms you have, and that will point us to a diagnosis. Once we have a likely diagnosis, I can prescribe a cure.

(Am I medically trained? No. You can trust me about as much as you can trust WebMD.)

Extended metaphors aside, I hope that if you’re struggling to write, this helps you work out the root cause, and figure out what you need to do about it.

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Diagnosis 1: You’re out of practice.

Are you experiencing these symptoms?

• You used to have a robust writing routine that worked for you, but lately you can’t get yourself to sit down and write.

• You got sidetracked by some trip, or some busy period, and now you can’t figure out how you ever made time for your writing.

• The thought of trying to write a single page intimidates you, even though you used to do it with ease.

• You tell people (or yourself) that you’re about to get back to writing—you’re just waiting for X day, X event, X sign from the universe.

• You never have any story ideas lately, though you used to have them all the time.

Here’s your diagnosis.

Don’t worry, this is a mild diagnosis. You’ve just fallen out of practice. Writing is like exercise, and you haven’t worked out in ages. No wonder your muscles protest when you try to jump back into your old routine.

I fall prey to this one all the time. I’ll allow a few months to pass between projects, and then suddenly the thought of sitting down to write is daunting and alien to me. How is it possible that I used to bash out a short story in a matter of days? Now I’d be amazed if I made it beyond a single paragraph.

Feeling totally out of shape when you sit down to write can be painful. But luckily, like with exercise, it only takes a few days for your body to remember the old rhythms and get back into it. The hardest part is getting started again.

Here’s your prescription.

Think back to the last time you had a good writing routine going. What time of day worked best for you? Are there any specific locations that you associate with the good writing days? Music or no music? The bustle of other people around, or absolute stillness? Short stints, or long marathon sessions?

For your first few days getting back in practice, you want the circumstances to be ideal. Create the writing environment that used to work for you. Then show up in that environment and try to write—again and again, whether or not it seems to be working. Maybe you won’t produce anything on Attempt 1, and you’ll produce only trash on Attempt 3, but by Attempt 6 you should feel like your old self again.

What I’ve noticed is that when I’m “in practice”—when I’m writing consistently—all sorts of story ideas occur to me. I’ll be washing the dishes and a passing thought will cross my mind, and I’ll think: I could make a story out of that. And then I’ll sit down and scribble down a few paragraphs, without feeling like I’m crossing any kind of momentous threshold. Writing, not writing: it’s a thin line between the two.

Whereas, when I’m out of practice, that thin line becomes a wall. The same passing thought can cross my mind without ever registering as an “idea.” I’ll get convinced that I’ve lost some imaginative spark that I used to have—when the truth is, I’m just not in the habit of noticing my own ideas.

If this is all sounding familiar, try showing up five or six times under ideal writing conditions. Expect it to be a slog the first few times. Don’t get discouraged just because it’s harder than it used to be. After six or so sessions, you should be back in practice and ready to keep writing.

If not, you might have something more serious.

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Diagnosis 2: You have nothing to say.

Are you experiencing these symptoms?

• You normally have a good writing routine, but lately, nothing comes out when you try to write. Whatever you do produce is empty or circular.

• You’ve just finished some big writing project, and you can’t figure out what to write next.

• You have a lot of ideas about what you should work on, and you hop between them without making progress on any of them.

• You feel that the quality of your writing has gotten worse over the last few months instead of better.

• You keep telling yourself to write, and making resolutions to write more, and then you don’t do it.

Here’s your diagnosis.

You have nothing to say right now.

Which is okay! This diagnosis is kind of like the common cold: it’s annoying, it’s inconvenient, but it’s not life-threatening and it eventually goes away on its own.

This one often happens at the end of some huge project. For years, you’ve been grappling with the same thorny question about the world and your place in it. Now the project is done, and you’ve got nothing to grapple with. You just feel kind of empty. You try to rev up and write the next novel, but you don’t know what to write about. You try to return to some earlier idea that used to mean something to you, but you can’t get excited about it.

Sometimes this isn’t triggered by the end of a big project, but just by a change in life circumstances. Maybe you’re feeling settled and basically stable. Maybe some huge question mark in your life has recently resolved. Maybe the central tension in your life that was pushing you to write is now clear to you, and therefore uninteresting.

This is what I’m dealing with right now. My novel is coming out in the fall. Now would be a great time for me to get a head start on a new manuscript. Except… I don’t really know what to write about. The Big Life Questions I was chewing on with novel #1 got answered in the process of writing it. I don’t know that I have a Big Life Question at this exact moment. I have a lot of small questions, but none of them stand out as the next great obsession.

Here’s your prescription.

Let the field lie fallow. Stop trying to force yourself to write. Give yourself a break. Walk away.

Yes, you’re going to fall out of practice, and then you’ll have to deal with Diagnosis #1. But realistically, once you land on an idea you’re excited about, it’ll take you just a couple days to get back in good writing shape.

In the meantime, go have a human life. Collect experiences that might someday turn into stories. Study your friends and their weird lives. Read a lot of books. Get curious about the world again. When you’re in the thick of a writing project, you’ll spend a lot of time looking inward. Take this time to look outward.

You’ll know when it’s time to start writing again—when some threat or conflict or question emerges as the great obsessive center of your thoughts.

If it’s taking a while—if you feel like you’ve let the field lie fallow for ages, and the soil is still terrible—then you might have a different diagnosis.

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Diagnosis 3: You care too much what other people think.

Are you experiencing these symptoms?

• You are terrified to finish your writing project, because then you’ll have to find out whether or not it’s any good.

• You think about your project all the time, but you hardly ever sit down to work on it.

• You spend more time revising than writing, even though your project isn’t done yet.

• You have to force yourself to write with deadlines and accountability partners, and you miss those deadlines.

• You have unpleasant voices in your head when you write, telling you that your work isn’t good enough.

• You’re always trying to gather information on whether the market will want this kind of book, and how agents and publishers might react—without actually finishing it, or sending it out.

Here’s your diagnosis.

I’m afraid it’s serious. You care so much about what other people will think of your writing that it’s keeping you from writing.

Because you are consumed with the thought of how your work will be received, every sentence you write feels incredibly high-stakes. Writing, for you, is a battle, a relentless negotiation between your hopes and your fears. How you feel about this project is conditional: IF it works, IF it succeeds, you’ll be glad to have written it. If not, you’ll rue every minute you spent on it.

How are you supposed to write under those conditions?

When I’ve tried to write with a certain outcome in mind—e.g., I’m going to write this novel because it sounds like one my agent will get excited about—the results have been disastrous. It’s not that I get entirely stuck, but that I have to grit out every page with grim and joyless determination.

Surprise: if you don’t have fun writing a novel, the reader won’t have fun reading it.

So how do you stop caring what other people think?

Here’s your prescription.

You have to want to write this story NO MATTER WHAT. Even if it doesn’t sell. Even if it never reaches a single reader. Even if it ends up in a box in your grandkids’ basement.

If you knew that was the fate of this story, would you still write it?

Your answer has to be yes. Otherwise, choose a different story, or a different career.

There are no guarantees in the writing business. The rules change all the time, and the trends change even faster. Also, whatever you’re imagining as the final reward for all this work you’re putting in—it’s not going to feel like a reward when you get to it. You got an agent? Great, now you’re worried about going on submission. You got a publisher? Great, now you’re worried about selling enough copies. You sold enough copies? Great, now you have to write a second book.

All of this pressure will mount and consume you if you’re writing in order to reach some pinnacle of achievement, recognition, envy. But if you’re writing just because you’d rather write than not—in other words, if you’re writing for yourself—you’ll be able to weather the rises and falls of your writing career and keep showing up to the page.

Choose a project that you would want to finish no matter what. Zombie apocalypse, fascist dictator, the end of literacy—doesn’t matter, you’d still see it through.

Every time doubts start creeping in about whether this project will be viable in the marketplace, whether people will like it, whether it will sell, remind yourself that if zombies were patrolling the streets, you would still be locked in your study typing away.

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Diagnosis 4: You’re working on the wrong project.

Are you experiencing these symptoms?

• You’ve been working on this project a long time, but you seem to make less progress on it with every passing year.

• You had the idea for this project at a very different time in your life, when your chief concerns and your conception of the world were totally alien to what they are today.

• This project has been the first item in your to-do list for the last six months, but you never seem to get around to it.

• When people ask about this project, you don’t want to talk about it.

• You feel you’ve made it far enough with this project that you ought to finish it—otherwise, all that work will have been wasted.

Here’s your diagnosis.

This might have been the right project for you once, but it’s not anymore. You’ve outgrown it.

It’s hard to admit to yourself that you’re no longer excited about something you used to care about. But you’ve been avoiding this thing for so long. Maybe you’re avoiding it for a reason? Maybe the prose style of this project, the concept, the themes, are all relics of a past self that you couldn’t access nowadays, even if you wanted to.

Here’s your prescription.

You’ve got to let this thing go.

The time and effort you put into it will not have been wasted. Without knowing it, you’ve been practicing all these years for the next project, which is going to be much better.

Did you take this project through twenty-five rounds of revision? Did you spend hours on the query letter? Did you hire a freelance editor? Did you lovingly proofread every last word? Great—that was all practice.

Think of the old project as a bowl you made in a ceramics class. The bowl is cracked, and you applied coat after coat of glaze to hold it all together, and you painted it rather prettily, and meanwhile the crack just kept widening at the base. This thing does not need more glaze. You could make a much better bowl (and do it much faster) by taking all the skills you’ve gained and applying them to a lump of clay that doesn’t have a crack in it.

Let the old project go. Write something that you won’t want to avoid.

—unless you’ve avoided and then abandoned the last ten projects you worked on. In that case, you might have a different diagnosis.

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Diagnosis 5: You’re stuck in infinite revision loop.

Are you experiencing these symptoms?

• Your project is around halfway done.

• You know you need to finish the project and land the plane, but you can’t write the ending until you fix some things about the beginning.

• You’ve edited the first chapter so many times you can practically recite it.

• If you come back to your project after a long break, you start back at the beginning and reread.

• You’ve shared the first portion of your project for feedback and have made edits based on multiple readers’ suggestions.

• You’ve been stuck at the same place for a long time.

• Your first chapter is now so good and so polished that you have no idea how you wrote it.

Here’s your diagnosis.

You’re stuck in infinite revision loop, and this one is a killer. You could spend thirty years in infinite revision loop, not even knowing you’re sick, and then one day you’ll wake up and realize: I am never going to finish this project, am I?

Here’s why the loop is so dangerous. Every time you go back and revise Chapter 1 rather than continuing on to Chapter 16, you are creating a huge quality gap in your work. Chapter 1 is getting better and better, and Chapter 16 doesn’t exist yet. The wider this chasm gets, the scarier it’s going to be to write Chapter 16, because the new material you’re putting down looks just dreadful next to the hyper-polished pages you already have. So, to reassure yourself, you go back and reread Chapter 1, basking in how good your prose is. Then you work your way through to Chapter 15, polishing all the way, and you hit Chapter 16 again—and everything you write looks like garbage. Must be a problem earlier in the manuscript. Back to Chapter 1!

Another reason to fear infinite revision loop: every time you work back through a chapter, you get more attached to it. You get to used to seeing those words in that place. So if it occurs to you, on your 95th read-through of Chapter 1, that actually the story ought to start with Chapter 5—you’re just not going to do it. All those polished, beautiful words! How could you possibly throw them away, when you’ve spent the last fifteen years perfecting them?

Infinite revision loop, if left untreated long enough, is fatal. It will kill your project and your hope.

Luckily, there is a cure—but it’ll be a tough pill to swallow.

Here’s your prescription.

You are banned from revising any part of your project until the draft is done.

Depending on the strength of your willpower, you may need to take drastic measures here. Email Chapters 1-15 to a friend and then delete them from your computer. Create a new document for Chapter 16-onwards. Prevent yourself from accessing, even looking at the first half of your project.

Your job is to write your way to the end of this draft, without ever looking back at what you’ve written. You are Orpheus, and this whole thing is going to collapse if you look back over your shoulder even once.

But what if you need to check on some minor detail in Chapter 3?

Doesn’t matter. Go off memory. You can fix it later.

But what if that character you killed off in Chapter 6 turns out to be necessary in Chapter 32?

Bring him back to life. You can fix it later.

But what if—

FINISH THE DRAFT. You have to finish the draft. You have to reach the last page of the draft. That is the only way this project will survive.

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Diagnosis 6: You’re stuck in your life.

Are you experiencing these symptoms?

• You keep receiving the same feedback on your project, however many times you try to address it.

• You have a good writing routine, you work reliably on the project, and yet you never seem to progress—it’s always two steps forward, two steps back.

• You’ve had multiple epiphanies about how to fix this project, none of which has really worked.

• Writing feels hard, grinding, teeth-gritted, the path of greatest resistance.

• You’re pretty sure you don’t have any of the diagnoses listed above, and yet you’re still not writing.

Here’s your diagnosis.

I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that you don’t actually have a problem with your writing. You’re sitting down to write, putting in the hours, avoiding the usual pitfalls. That has served you well in the past, and it will serve you well in the future.

The bad news is that you do have a problem. The problem is you.

You are stuck in your life. You are deeply dissatisfied or frustrated or angry with something, and you’re not admitting it to yourself, and you’re not addressing it. Or maybe you’re aware of it, but you can’t seem to accept the situation and move on.

As long as you are stuck in your life, you will be stuck in your writing. Your writing needs you to “go there,” to say the hard things, the scary things, to leave it all on the field. You can’t do that if you’re stuck. You might not even be able to imagine what that would look like.

A friend of mine described it this way: “The wheels are turning and turning, but they’re just driving deeper into the mud.”

You have been working so hard for so long. Why isn’t anything coming together? Why is the project never fully done? Why are none of these projects the right project? Why do people keep telling you to do the same thing, draft after draft after draft?

Because there’s something totally separate from your writing that you need to address in order to move forward.

Here’s your prescription.

I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you’re dealing with. But here are some things that can help.

Take a long break from writing. Cultivate silence, stillness, boredom. As long as your life keeps humming along at the same distracting pace, you will never have to confront whatever is blocking you. (And if you don’t have to confront it, you won’t. Whatever is blocking you is going to be scary and hard.)

Spend some time trying to get the balance of your life right. Pay attention to how the components of your daily routine make you feel. Try some things that aren’t in your daily routine. See if you can find a better way to start the morning, a better way to end the day.

Treat your devices as the enemy. Your phone, your laptop, your TV: they want you to stay plugged in, numbed, distracted, all the time. See if you can do without them for longer periods. See how it feels to try to do without them. If you get the shakes because you spent one hour off email, that’s a sign that you need to reduce your dependence. All the attention that goes to your devices is attention you’re not paying to the thing that’s blocking you.

Don’t multitask. Do one thing at a time, and see how it feels when it has a 100% share of your attention. Do you actually like this TV show, or is it just tolerable because you’re always answering emails as you watch? If it doesn’t deserve 100% of your attention, it doesn’t deserve 30% either. Give full attention to everything, and see which parts of your life reward that full attention, and which don’t.

None of this has much to do with writing—except that writing is so personal, and it requires both honesty and distance. You need to be able to look at your life, calmly, from afar, in order to write well. And when you are caught up in the buzz of urgency and distraction and grievance and denial, you can’t then suddenly switch into calm, measured distance for an hour a day. It’s not going to work.

Set the writing aside. See what your life looks like without any big, identity-shaping project at the center of it.

I promise that if you get unstuck in your life—if you even just come to terms with why you’ve been stuck—you will find it easier to start writing again.

It worked for me.

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Okay, that’s my absolute best take on writer’s block and its many possible sources. I hope this post was helpful to you—I hope it rattled you a little—I hope you come away from it with a plan.

Next week (or the week after? I’m slowing down a little) I’ll answer more of the requests that came in.

Thanks for reading—and good luck out there!