Paul Silvia, in his 2007 (2nd ed. 2019) book How to Write a Lot, insists that writer’s block is a myth. In his view, it’s just an excuse: “giving a fancy name to feeling frustrated with your writing makes your frustration seem more grave and complex than it is.” It’s just a term, not a reality—it’s “nothing more than the behavior of not writing.”
Or more pointedly: “Just as aliens abduct only people who believe in alien abductions, writer’s block afflicts only writers who believe in it.” There. That’ll teach you to stop whining.
“Finding” time to write is another one of his pet peeves. Instead of hunting around your schedule for that reclusive creature called “Time to Write,” he says, maybe you should consider just allotting time to write. You have no shortage of time to teach, after all—because teaching is written into your schedule.
As a generally no-nonsense, curmudgeonly sort of a person, in principle I sympathize with Silvia’s wry take. Of course he’s right that blaming some mysterious “block” is a handy excuse for not getting more writing done. Probably we could have made some progress simply by refraining from using a few tried-and-true procrastination methods.
And yet…
It took me a while, but I finally figured out that the problem I have with Silvia’s straightforward “just write” advice is the following: It’s like telling someone complaining of failed diets to “just eat less” or someone unable to kick their cigarette habit to “just quit smoking.”
True, that would work. But given how many people struggle with trying to lose weight or quit smoking, it probably isn’t quite that simple. (For the record, it took me well over a decade and at least nine different attempts to quit smoking, and I’m still not particularly confident that not smoking will be my permanent state.)
Fundamentally, I think, the difficulty that academics experience with “writer’s block” has to do with the high stakes. Academia puts a lot of stress on the importance of writing. This is particularly true in the humanities, but it also applies in the sciences, if in a somewhat different guise—perhaps with less emphasis on eloquence and more emphasis on being precise and clever.
We’ve all probably been told that good writing is related to good thinking. In the humanities, we actually advertise to students that learning to write well helps improve your thinking. Inadvertently, we thereby create the worry that perhaps the converse might also be true—if your writing isn’t very strong, maybe that means that you’re a weak thinker?
Who would want to reveal to the world that they are a mediocre thinker? Hence, writer’s block.
In fact, digging around for information about writer’s block, I came across a sociology dissertation that argued for a structural interpretation of writer’s block among undergraduates. That is, writing is a high-stakes performance that can determine one’s academic success and thereby one’s career trajectory. The awareness of those high stakes can cause students to “choke” and be unable to even get started writing. The author, Lara Birk, argued that this can be particularly true for working-class or disadvantaged students.
Now, I haven’t perused the dissertation closely enough to offer an opinion of how well the study holds water, but I thought the idea was interesting. Certainly I can anecdotally attest that something like that is often going on with colleagues and clients who are “stuck” with their projects.
So I suspect that there’s a bit more going on than “just write.” Sure, just write, if that works. And yes, do schedule writing time into your calendar, preferably every day, even a little bit.
But also, cut yourself some slack. Beating yourself up about not writing is probably not a productive strategy to get there (in fact, my next post will be precisely about that).
(This post is the second in a series of posts on the fears and unproductive thoughts about writing that we all have. Except those lucky few, who may or may not be lying.)
