Recipe For Writer’s Block
- Sep 5, 2024
- 5 min read
Dr Rachel Knightley is a fiction and non-fiction author, presenter, lecturer and writing and confidence coach.
Take one blank page. Any will do. Lined or unlined, screen or notebook: the important thing is to stare and wait – pen raised, or fingers hovering over the keys – as if the words are supposed to be coming from it to you, instead of from you to it.
Consider every writer you have ever admired
Not just all the ones you like reading and tell yourself (in great detail) you will never be as good as, but all the ones you feel you ‘should’ like. The ones who intimidate you. The people whose words or faces you associate with your own perceived unworthiness. The ones who bore you, or irritate you. Then you can tell yourself what you like isn’t what other people like anyway. Gloss lightly over the ones who encourage you – either personally or through what you’ve read by them or about them – in order to focus on the ones whose presence, somewhere in the world (present or past), is a shortcut to telling yourself that of course your page is blank; you were crazy to think you deserved to be anything alongside them. Least of all a fellow-writer.
Focus on how good you want the writing to be, instead of what you want to write
Do not under any circumstances give yourself the fun of a tasty ‘what if…?’ to get you building a character, creating a situation, imagining a conversation, planning a structure. Instead, focus on an ‘it must’. It must be good. It must be impressive. It must be representative of everything I am and everything I can be. I must get every idea I have into this one book because I’ll obviously never write another. This is a reassuringly clear, unarguably binary approach where there is only absolute success or absolute failure. Whereas, if you let yourself play with a ‘what if’, such as ‘what if a character does this…?’ or ‘what if an event is like that…?’, you don’t have that reassuring clarity of knowing you’re a failure. Instead, you might find your mind drifting; you might find yourself writing something different to anything you planned or anything you ever expected – and that means relinquishing all that reassuring control. To avoid that scary loss of control, just focus on the quality you want the unwritten or barely written thing to achieve. The audience response you believe it vital to get for your unwritten or barely written thing – then, because you can’t guarantee getting it from something unfinished, you can reassure yourself it wasn’t worth writing in the first place and never would. After that, when (if) you’re (ever) ready, you can return to step one: staring at the blank page.
Convince yourself you have to do this alone
Remind yourself that the countless Writing Rooms, writing events, writing workshops, writing organisations, writing magazines, writing coaches, writing groups, writing degrees and other ways to make your writing a visible part of your life (and build a community that shares your interest in it) are all, essentially, cheating. Tell yourself that the isolated, struggling artist is the only model for a true writer. Tell yourself about ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘pyramid schemes’ so you can convince yourself that accepting help from any agent, editor, coach, tutor or writing group or anyone outside of your own head is not only unnecessary but immoral. In your own time, return to step one.
Don’t read within your genre, in case the styles influence you
After all, what if you read something you liked the sound of and saw that another writer had your exact idea and already written it before you? Okay, it couldn’t literally be your exact idea and exact voice, because only you could ever have that exact combination, but what if it’s close? What if an idea like yours already existed in the world? What if your idea isn’t one hundred per cent unique in every way? That would obviously mean you had nothing new to contribute to literature; that you couldn’t use your idea. Return, despairing and more convinced of the need for what you write to be good, to step one: staring at the blank page.
Don’t read outside your genre, in case you get distracted
Or if not distracted, change your mind. Or if not change your mind, realize there are other ideas in you so you feel overwhelmed with how many books could actually be in your future when none exist in your present. Instead of another tasty ‘what if’, such as ‘what if I write all them one day, one at a time,’ avoid looking too closely at other ideas for fear of overwhelm. Focus instead on how good you want the one your current unwritten idea to be.
Do not, under any circumstances, enroll for the 'Free Writing Room' run every week by The Writers’ Gym
Even though it’s a drop-in session, so you can just pop in during your lunch-hour (or stay for the whole thing). That’s far too dangerous. Because imagine if you realized you could actually grab a few minutes? And that those few minutes add up to more and more words? Do not attend Coffee and Creativity in the middle of the week either. Then you’d inevitably make friends and get lots more writing done. It shouldn’t be that easy. Should it?
Above all, sit and wait for inspiration. Remind yourself that writing should never involve hard work like cleaning the house or learning the violin do. Writing, surely, is about a perfect idea landing perfectly in your head at the perfect time you can write it down word for word. Pushing out one thought at a time, and accepting you’ll only really know what you have – or what you mean – when you’ve laid it all out on paper and are spending regular time editing and developing it? Surely not. Surely writing is about being inspired; not about working hard to move closer and closer to your meaning with every step, every word, one layer at a time. That would be crazy. Wouldn’t it?
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Visit the Writers’ Gym at writersgym.com Dr Rachel Knightley is a fiction and non-fiction author, qualified business and personal coach and the founder of The Writers’ Gym membership and podcast. She lectures in creative writing and is currently resident at Riverside Studios, London.
Dr Rachel Knightley is a fiction and non-fiction author, presenter, lecturer and writing and confidence coach. Her background in directing and performing for theatre formed her fascination with the power of the stories we tell ourselves to shape our identity. She writes and presents for magazines, YouTube channels and Blu-ray extras, lectures in creative writing and works with private clients online and in southwest London.
