All of my clients struggle with writer’s block at some point, and they can become frustrated with themselves over their “procrastination”. But sometimes writer’s block is intelligent. Sometimes the subconscious needs to tell us something through that block. Gentle inquiry can reveal whether we’re blocking from plain old procrastination, or if there’s a deeper reason that needs some genuine care.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these Writer’s Block Types?
1. The Wrong Timeslot Writer. One woman had a fantastic book idea and structure ready to go. She was a very busy mom who held down a part-time job as well, but she figured she could get a first draft done by writing 20 minutes per day every weekday morning for a year.
The only problem was, she never completed that 20-minute session. She’d get up early and sit down with her coffee and laptop before the rest of the house was awake. She had no words. Nothing.
She could talk for hours about her book idea with friends, could easily write whole sections during weekend writing workshops. But trying to write in those quiet early morning hours? Not happening.
I had a good sense of why, but she had to do an experiment first. This was the hardest part: She had to successfully complete one 20-minute morning writing session. Then, she needed to make note of what happened with the rest of that day.
With a specific deadline and topic assigned, and the pressure of a coach expecting completion, she did pull it off. I was not surprised when she let me know that the writing she produced was decent, but the rest of her morning was awful. She felt irritated with the kids, forgot to pack one child’s lunch, and struggled to remember everything she needed to get herself ready and out the door to her day job.
Writing brings us into a strange and wonderful mindset, involving both logic and creativity. For many writers, even instructional non-fiction writing can bring them into a trance-like state. While they may take only 20 minutes to write a passage, they may need another half hour to step out of the writing mindset and re-enter the ordinary world.
If they rush that re-entry process, it can make them grumpy, forgetful, and irritated with loved ones or co-workers. Hence, writing for 20 minutes right before a busy, logistically complex morning routine, might not be the greatest fit.
This writer was blocking—wisely—because her “writing appointment time” was a total mismatch for her lifestyle. Shifting from 20-minutes-every-morning to 90-minutes-every-Sunday-afternoon revolutionized her book-writing process.
2. The Know-What-You-Write Writer. A young fantasy writer was absolutely stalled out on a certain turning-point scene in a book that was otherwise strong. No matter what he wrote, the normally intriguing characters came off dull and static. First he began to block any time he tried to work on that specific scene. Then he quit work on the book in entirety.
After several minutes of inquiry, chatting about the problem scene, it became apparent that the writer really didn’t know if the legal conflict in this scene was feasible in this fantasy world. “Well, you need to fact-check that,” I said. “Just like any reporter.”
“But it’s a fantasy novel,” he said. “I’m the one who makes up this world’s rules.”
“Yessss… but if you want those rules to be believable, you might try basing them on some researchable laws. Talk to an attorney who knows that conflict in our world. Then you’ll have a base to start from.”
This writer was blocking because he’d entered terra incognita. Everyone has heard that you ought to “write what you know.” That’s spot-on advice for young writers who can get into deep water trying to write about topics, places, and events with which they have no experience. But the literary world would be an exceptionally dull place if all writers only wrote about their own lives.
The fix? If you aren’t “writing what you know”, then “get to know what you’re writing”. That means research. Every writer must research and fact-check, not just investigative journalists.
I have contact lists full of doctors, herbalists, and scientists for my medical writing. That’s understandable. But my memoir and fiction work also calls for contacts who are experts in military history, criminal law, police work, self-defense, range science, cattle ranching, forest fires, and hitchhiking, just to name a few niche topics. I don’t know a thing about those realities, so I better interview people who do!
I’ve blocked for months because I didn’t realize how much I needed an expert interview to bring depth and believability to a certain scene. Once that interview was complete, I was able to write like the wind again. So was my fantasy-writer client.
3. The Wrong-Season Writer. Living in Montana, I coach some incredible writers who really do live and work on cattle ranches. These cowboy and cowgirl authors have a definite seasonality to their lives. They have a shit-ton of common sense too. One thing I learned quickly is that they all get writer’s block in the late winter and early spring when calving season begins. And they’re unapologetic about it. Calving season means all-consuming around-the-clock work. I don’t expect any new draft material from these authors during that time, and I fully trust they’ll start writing again when the calves have gotten through the coldest months and are doing well.
That’s an extreme and unique situation, but there are other lifestyles that have seasonal realities we have to accept.
If you’re a mother of four elementary school kids, it might be excessive to expect yourself to produce draft content every day during the first three weeks of the school year. If your day job is in any industry that has seasonal ebb and flow, there may be several-week periods when you have to give yourself a break from moonlighting at the computer and simply catch up on sleep instead. Certain marketing jobs have trade show seasons, and anyone who manages a retail store during the holidays or runs a restaurant in a tourist town knows there are such crunch weeks.
Yes, ideally, you’d keep writing all the way through. But maybe you genuinely can’t, and it only makes you discouraged to try. This is legitimate writer’s block coming from the fact that you have zero energy to write well. Get out your calendar. Note your first off day after the work rush and block off a half-day writer’s retreat. You’ll have earned it, and you’ll need several uninterrupted hours to re-connect with your writing.
4. The Wrong-Reason Writer. One of the first topics I cover in any coaching series is the Wrong Reasons to Write a Book. It’s amazing how often people come to me convinced that writing and publishing their one and only book will make them rich, get them revenge, bring them fame, convince a loved one of their writing genius, or carry out the will of a spiritual entity that told them to write.
Anyone who believes they have a book’s worth of relevant and captivating word count within them has a decent sized ego. That’s okay. But ego-generated reasons for writing are fast-burning fuel. They’ll get you through a few inspired paragraphs, maybe even a whole chapter or two. But at some point, that flash fuel burns out.
Only far deeper, more meaningful, and genuinely spiritual reasons will keep you going through the years-long draft-writing and revision process… and hold you steady through another years-long journey of finding representation and publication, or self-publishing and doing your own marketing for the rest of the book’s life.
What drives you to write this book? What makes you the only one who can tell this story in this way? Why now?
These are the questions that can uncover whether you have a deep, soul-level reason for writing. If you don’t, it’s possible you’re blocking simply because you had the wrong reasons to write in the first place. Now there’s no real fuel left to keep the book going. It’s better to face that fact and gently let the project go.
5. The Too-Soon Writer. I had a potential client come to me once who wanted to write a memoir about surviving a certain medical condition. She had a busy family life, but she did have time for a commitment to regular draft-writing. For some reason she kept having writer’s block even though she could easily set aside one quiet hour, two days a week. She hoped monthly coaching sessions would help her break through.
At the first coaching session she revealed that she had only started treatment for her medical issue. Her prognosis was good, but she was definitely not writing this “survival memoir” in the past tense. She hadn’t survived it yet; it was still happening to her!
I shared that I typically recommend that authors of “traumatic survival memoirs” wait to write till at least seven years after the initial crisis. Was it possible that this woman’s intuition was making her “block” because there was no way she could write objectively about this experience? How could she see the shape and arc of her story if it hadn’t happened yet?
It was crucial that she journal through this time. Those journals could become invaluable fact-checking resources years later when she worked on her actual book. But putting pressure on herself to write book-worthy content seemed unwise. I told her that I couldn’t in good conscience coach her as an author and felt that her deep, wise intuition was responsible for causing an intelligent writer’s block.
Yes, there are examples of people who have blogged their way through a major life crisis, and that raw as-it-happened material turned into a book deal. Realize this is exceptionally rare. Typically when it does happen, the blogger was already a professional writer or editor, and blogged with a highly refined self-editing eye.
Most of the time when a non-writer tries to write a book about a current crisis, it results in rough, therapeutic content. When a coach or editor tries to critique the work, the writer is too raw to receive the edits well—the revision requests only come across as personal slights.
On a deep intuitive level, we all know that might happen. Blocking “during the crisis” is wise. Go ahead and journal during those tough years. But don’t put any pressure on yourself to write a whole book from within the trenches.
These are only 5 of the more common reasons for writer’s block. There are as many reasons as there are books on the planet. How about you? Did you ever have writer’s block and it wasn’t from garden-variety procrastination? What did you learn? What did you do about it?