Why writer’s block is normal, and how to deal with it

Written by Hayley Bernier

So, you have an idea for a piece of writing. You’ve been building it up slowly on the page and in your head. Everything is strong and you’ve found a real direction. And then something changes. A shift in mood, maybe a rejection, a bad day, a bout of anxiety or stress or depression, maybe nothing even perceptible, and suddenly, everything you loved about your own project is a flaw that you want to tear into tiny little pieces and set on fire. Or maybe your feelings aren’t quite so violent, but you simply can’t work on it anymore. Or anything else, it seems. 

For example's sake, earlier this year I was working on a manuscript for a novel. I had a timeline which I built in Excel (something I had never done before, so that should show you how committed I was to this project). I had a document with a variety of scenes jotted down, lists of character names, specific details I had decided upon and around which I would continue to build. 

At the time I was visiting a friend in Whitehorse, in the Yukon territory. I was particularly inspired to create while in this new and beautiful place. Then I came home. I had gotten a job, and this ate up a couple months of my time and brain space. In May I surfaced from my swamp of tasks and remembered that I could work on this project that I felt so passionately about. Much to my UTTER HORROR, I looked for the files and found that they were mysteriously missing from my computer. 

My immediate reaction to losing these files, other than attempts to find/resurrect them to no avail, was to give up entirely. My hours of work building something had disappeared, so what was the point? Was this a message from the universe along the lines of “you should not be writing this or anything, you fool”?

I love to write. It’s a weird and involving and beautiful practice, and I feel like I am even halfway decent at it. I would do it even if I didn’t have a way to forge a career from it. So, what does it mean when you love something, but you find yourself rejecting it, refusing to engage? Are you really good at it—do you really love it, if you can simply put it down and walk away—or if you HAVE to walk away? Are you really a writer?

Writer’s block is the single most persistent issue with writing as a concept, both in reality and in the pop culture perception of writers. The idea that any “good” writer has to be consistently productive is ludicrous. Nobody, I repeat, NOBODY is actually constantly productive in a sustainable way. Being human means that we have limiting factors. 

A prolific master of horror with his own limiting factors, Stephen King, who has published more books than there are years of his life, is known to have written entire manuscripts in a matter of weeks, or even days. His intensity of production gave him a serious head start in the ’70s, when the horror genre was basically being born by his body of work.

But King wrote approximately thirty of his published works during a time when he was abusing alcohol, soon coupled with cocaine. I do not have the capacity to measure the substance-abuse-to-productivity-to-quality-of-art ratio that Stephen King has had over the course of his half-a-century long career, but you get the idea. Those circumstances were not sustainable for him, or the people he loved. He has been reportedly sober since his wife and family staged an intervention in the late ’80s. There are also large gaps in his memory.

The individual and their circumstances will invariably affect how they go about their work. There is no way around this. A rigid expectation of productivity will do nothing to help the individual work through whatever is blocking them. 

In contrast to an example of unsustainable productivity, which sheds some light on how writer's block can be so blown out of proportion, I have also encountered more realistic models of writing. These following approaches have taught me new ways I could write and still feel like I am allowed to be taken seriously.

Roxane Gay is quite an impressive creator of political commentary and memoir writing. Her practice is to write every day, even if it is only for a brief period of time. And her secondary tool to this, which encourages consistency, is to have multiple projects on the go. This is BRILLIANT. If you are a cross-genre writer and you have a lot of ideas, just start all of them! You want to write an epic? But also an essay about a personal experience? And you have a children’s book idea? Get all of those set up as separate documents, and then you have a little rolodex of options when you need (or want to) write. 

But the real nugget of gold for me here was the flexibility of production. Ultimately, the approach of writing every day, if only for ten minutes, gives you permission to write one bad sentence, call it a day, and try again tomorrow. Emphasizing consistency over quantity is a really simple but helpful reframing, and could allow you the space to make art when you want to and when you can, not because you feel you must.  

Another illustration of this is Ocean Vuong, a masterful poet and prose writer, best known for his novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, but also his newly released poetry collection Time is a Mother (which I highly highly recommend). Guess what? He doesn’t write every day! Knowing this completely changed how I talk to myself about productivity in writing, because I think Vuong is a once-in-a-generation poet. I was blown away to learn that he does not subscribe to the ideal of writing hundreds of words a day to stay sharp. Vuong, instead, does most of the construction of his work in his head, and only writes when he feels like he has something ready to write down.

Vuong’s method was my first encounter with such an idea; he’s writing by… not writing? Yet, it is this method that I am adopting—in part—for my sad, lost manuscript, which is floating somewhere in the ether of my laptop’s accidental trash. I already know a lot of my story. And yes, it’s terrible that the parts I had written have mostly disappeared—but this will not stop me. Even now, the story is happening already, I just have to write it down (maybe in longhand this time). 

Writer’s block is ultimately your brain needing a break. You either need to take some distance, some rest, or a different direction. And if the methods to “alleviate” this block are detrimental to your health, or if the pressure of productivity colliding into that block decreases your health, something needs to change (and it isn’t to augment your word count). If your body is tired, if you want to take a break, and if you can do so—do so. 

Writer’s block is simply the printer of your mind having run out of paper. You have to allow yourself time to restock and refuel. You need to take that time. This is a machine metaphor, but please remember, you aren’t one.