You’ve Got An Acute Case of Writer’s Block

This trio of skillful practices will help you pivot, so you can re-engage with your craft

Photo by Morgane Perraud on Unsplash

Let’s face it. You don’t get writer’s block because you suck as a writer. You get writer’s block because you’re afraid you suck as a writer.

Fear is always at the heart of writer’s block or any other kind of block. And when you start contracting around that fear, pretty soon you’re heading for the nearest exit.

What’s commonly known as writer’s block is really a neurophysiologic problem. Simply put, you feel an aversion to the perceived hardness of the writing task. You’re afraid that you may not be able to shape your mind to its exigencies skillfully enough. The terrifying thought, “What if I fail at this?” starts up, and pretty soon the sensation not just in the mind but more especially in the body feels almost unendurable. Next thing you know, you’re out of your chair, gone, hasta luego, leaving nothing but a thin contrail to show you were ever there in the first place.

Writer’s block Is an adaptive mechanism gone haywire

We’re all adapted to run when we feel besieged. And there may be no single activity that sets us up to feel more besieged than writing. It’s craft work! It originates in the murk of our thoughts and eventually (if we stick with it) assumes an elegant form and goes out to meet readers. Framed that way, it’s as intimate an offering as you could make without getting naked first.

But let’s be clear. What you’re really running from en route to the exit isn’t so much the block; it’s the sense of being squeezed. The renowned meditation master Chögyam Trungpa once asked his students years ago what they did when they felt uncomfortable. “What do you do when you get squeezed?” he said. “What do you do when things get unbearable?” According to Pema Chödrön, one of the students who was present when Trungpa Rinpoche asked that question, almost everyone answered very truthfully, saying that they just “completely fell apart, forgot about practice altogether, and became totally habitual in [their] reactions.”

I know precisely what my own habitual reactions are when I feel the familiar squeeze that accompanies the writing life. Usually it starts with a sigh of frustration when I’m struggling to capture an idea that hasn’t yet found its right expression. You know how it goes: there’s the idea, hovering in the near space, tantalizing but still inchoate. And here you are, sitting in your chair, bent over the page or more likely the keyboard, rifling through the archives in your brain, trying to locate the right words, the right phrasing, basically trying to land a triple Axel when your form is way off.

It can feel daunting.

Done with that business almost before it begins, I sometimes head to the refrigerator to do a little foraging. I kid myself that this takes the edge off the discomfort parked in the pit of my stomach. A bit of yogurt or a swig or two of kombucha seems to soften that felt sense of stuckness. But, ironically, when I head back to my laptop, I’m no less edgy for having self-soothed with food. I am in fact no better off for the skedaddle. And there sits my piece or my article or my manuscript, still in exactly the shape it was in when I took the exit.

Pema cautions us against always taking off when things feel tough. She says, “When we are threatened that way, we can’t stand to feel the pain, the edginess, the anxiety, the queasiness in our stomach. . . . Therefore, we try to grasp something pleasant. We react with this tragically human habit of seeking pleasure and trying to avoid pain.”

But what if you cultivated a more skillful relationship with your fear, so you could really lean in to your craft, regardless of whether you felt blocked?

It’s just fear, that’s all

Assuming for the moment that you’re not really blocked in the technical sense and that what you actually have is a bad case of Fear with a capital ‘F’ (which means that you’re still free to keep writing if you choose to), let’s begin with a list of common writerly fears.

Fear of being a pretender

You fear that sooner or later, someone’s going to put a stop to your shenanigans and declare out loud that you’re no good, that you’re an outright fake, and that your efforts are laughable.

Fear that writing is too hard

You fear that writing will never not feel like heavy, overwhelming work (even though you claim to love it). Moreover, you fear that you’ll always have to grind five times harder than anyone else.

Fear of remaining invisible

You fear that no matter how good you are, the fruits of your craft are fated never to find the right audience, that the optimal sets of eyeballs are always going to be rolling around looking at other people’s stuff.

Fear that the dream was always too ephemeral

You fear that when those Big Dreams of becoming a writer were being handed out in some long-ago cosmic moment during which we all stood around waiting to see which of us was destined to get lucky, you were off using the loo. In which case you now view your tender wish to become a writer as something no one could ever take seriously because when you were meant to step forward to collect the dream, you were indisposed.

The truth is, there are dozens of nasty fears that could knock you off the rails. I’ve always feared having to abandon something I’ve worked hard on. All that effort . . . and for what? Nevertheless, I once had to scrap a 900 page manuscript. It just didn’t work. But man, did it teach me a lot.

In the end, what it really all boils down to is the one primordial Bigfoot-sized fear: that your writing isn’t good enough to live out in the world, where other humans can find it and possibly disparage it.

The definitive cure

All these fears are of course lies cooked up by your over-busy, egoic mind, a space so colored by fear that it cannot ever properly be acknowledged as trustworthy. And sure, it takes a mindset fix to tackle writer’s block, but you’ve absolutely got to address what’s going on in the body first. You have got to soften that itch to take the exit whenever you feel squeezed.

So we’ve established that those pesky thoughts spewing from discursive mind can easily derail you. But it’s actually the way your body tightens up in response that really messes with you! Oddly, the same mind that is your writing tool also is the mind that messes with your head when you’re trying to write. And it resists ever being gentled because the egoic charge is too everlastingly strong. In fact, spewing mind never takes a day or even an hour off, never gets any less scornful, never interrupts its regularly scheduled programming to prime you for success. So you definitely can’t defeat it by playing its games on its turf.

You have to circumvent it altogether.

Fix the body to fix the mind

You do this by training the body. When your stomach clenches, when your heart feels like it’s sinking, when your jaw tightens, when you start getting physically restless, you need to re-message the body, by reaffirming its okayness. It’s the body you’ve got to gentle, in other words. Because you’ve been conditioned to react bodily to signals from the mind, you unconsciously read the upset as a sign that you’re in real distress.

You can begin to reverse this by acknowledging to yourself that the uneasiness showing up in the body is basically a false alarm. You are in no real danger. You are not under any threat. You’re just wrangling with a task whose inherent personal riskiness seems to carry the (fake) promise of total annihilation in the event that your writing efforts fail.

You’re getting triggered, yes, but there is no real or present danger.

Recruit the breath

Using the breath, you can immediately gentle the body and bring yourself back into an authentic ease of being.

Take a couple of very slow, deep breaths right now, and see if you can really connect with the out-breath, touching into it lightly or even imagining yourself becoming one with it on the exhale. You see how that feels? Breathing works wonders! It signals to a cagey nervous system already on high alert that you’re actually totally okay.

Next time you sit down to write and you start to notice a tightness in the body, bring awareness to where you feel it. Then, practice slow, deep breathing for a minute or two. Imagine that you’re sending the out-breath down into the area of the body that feels the most tense and heavy. Picture the relief you’re delivering to the place that really needs softening. Recognize that you’re dialing down the body’s autonomic alertness by using the breath as a kind of super-healthy analgesic, taking the pain and overwhelm back down to a healthy baseline.

Two key indicators that this is working? You’ll feel your stomach begin to unclench and relax, and you’ll feel your chest begin to expand in proportion to the spaciousness that opens up through your breath work.

You stick with this for a couple of minutes next time you feel blocked, and you will absolutely feel deep relief!

Shift the tone you use with yourself

Also. You’ve got to stop being mean to yourself. That’s it, there it is. You cannot talk to yourself like you’re a pathetic, zero-talent loser.

But since your mind is never going to cue up for that game, you’ve got to take charge, by starting a ritual we’ll call Gentle Talk.

In Gentle Talk, you acknowledge that mean mind is going to spew because that’s what mean mind does. Then you begin interjecting, speaking to yourself either silently or aloud. “You’re okay,” you can say to yourself in a tone of genuine support. “You can manage this.”

It helps to script a few phrases beforehand, so you don’t get blindsided next time mean mind gets wound up. “You can sit with this until it passes,” is a good one, especially when you’re starting to get itchy. Or, “You can give it a minute, right? Sixty seconds, how about that? — just to wait out the discomfort.”

What matters is starting that talk, and starting gently, in a spirit of warmth and friendliness.

This doesn’t mean there’s no longer rigor in your writing schedule. And it certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t be exacting with yourself as you seek to improve your craft. But it does mean that you speak to your (seemingly) blocked self the way you would talk to someone you cared about. In short, you use the tone and the words you normally would reserve for a lover or a best friend or a small child or a highly cherished pet, replacing mind-spew with words of love. Over and over, you’re going to counteract the energetic of blocked-ness created by ego mind, offering words of sincere encouragement instead.

At first, it’ll feel a little cloying and fake.

Do it anyway! Do it religiously! If you need to, just tell yourself over and over that you’re a learner, that you’re cultivating a growth mindset, that you’re a human with an arc of change. To coopt that overused and by now cliché tagline from Nike, Just Do It!

You practice Gentle Talk enough times, the egoic mind’s power starts to wane, until one day you realize you’ve taken the narrative back, and the panic that had you dashing for the exit is no longer really a thing.

What Liz Gilbert’s practice looks like

I adore the writer Liz Gilbert. I love not only her books but also the way she shows up in the world, as an ambassador for self-gentleness. In an interview for Oprah.com, she said back in 2020,

“I need a dose of courage every day, because I’m frightened every day. There will always be a nervous little person inside me. But if there’s a creative project I’m afraid to attempt, a truth I need to tell, or a painful new reality I must face, I ask myself: ‘What’s the alternative?’”

To see what it looks like to talk gently to yourself, let’s take a peek at the way she does this practice, which she claims she undertakes every single day in order to safeguard her sanity and show up for the creative work she wants to put out into the world. Here is an Instagram post she did a while back, where she shares some of the love messaging she offers herself in times of distress:

1. What’s that, my baby? You feel like you’re failing at life? But may I ask: By whose rules? And by what deadline?
2. Please stop looking for proof that you are wrong and bad. Don’t be in such a hurry to disown yourself. And please, for the love of God, stop trying to transform. Just sit here with me for a moment, and let me love you exactly as you are. And maybe get yourself a nice big glass of water. That usually helps.
3. You don’t need to show compassion or patience to the world right now. Why would I force that on you, when you don’t actually feel it? You don’t even need to be grateful right now. I love you so much, I will never ask you to do anything you can’t do. Just sit here with me, and know that you are loved, and let that be all we do today.
4. Stop trying. Does that scare you? Do you still have trouble believing how loved you are — even when you are doing nothing, producing nothing, improving nothing, understanding nothing? Can you sit quietly with me for a moment and consider the possibilities?
5. Can you find the courage and curiosity to live one breath at a time? Can you breathe into this very moment, right now? Because “right now” is the only place I will ever be able to find you. So meet me halfway, dear one, by taking the next breath.
6. You are not crazy or broken, sweetheart, but you do have a mind that requires constant, tender, affectionate stewardship. Good thing you have me!
7. I see how you much you fear solitude sometimes, but trust me: This is your medicine right now. Also, I have a secret for you: You’re not alone. It’s actually not even possible.
8. If it helps, sweetheart, you can’t possibly do anything wrong. By which I mean — you can’t possibly do anything that will lose me.
9. I’m right here. I have always been right here. I will always be right here. I’ve got nothing but time for you.
10. Don’t worry about how everyone else is doing it. There is no “everyone else.” There is only you and me. And my name is Love. And so is yours. So let’s just sit quietly now, and know this truth together.❤️

You’re tempted to loathe yourself as a writer when you start to feel uncomfortable and blocked? READ THIS MESSAGE FROM LIZ GILBERT ON REPEAT. And notice how gentle it is! Why do we often denigrate the practice of gentleness when in fact it is the straight-up antidote for all that leaves us feeling heavy and worthless and stuck??

If self-gentleness is effective, there’s another practice which is even more narrow in its aim. In a post on her own website, Liz says this to would-be writers:

“The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness. Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you. You will make vows: “I’m going to write for an hour every day,” and then you won’t do it. You will think: “I suck, I’m such a failure. I’m washed-up.” Continuing to write after that heartache of disappointment doesn’t take only discipline, but also self-forgiveness (which comes from a place of kind and encouraging and motherly love). The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck. When I was writing Eat, Pray, Love, I had just as strong a mantra of THIS SUCKS ringing through my head as anyone does when they write anything. But I had a clarion moment of truth during the process of that book. One day, when I was agonizing over how utterly bad my writing felt, I realized: “That’s actually not my problem.” The point I realized was this — I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly; I only promised the universe that I would write. So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.”

The vows Gilbert speaks of at the end of this passage refer to a ritual she staged when she was quite young. She made a vow with the universe that she would put her All into learning and practicing writing craft, showing up for it as faithfully and devotedly as she might show up for a love relationship. It’s that vow she has held to all these years. It’s that vow she honors each time she starts to feel blocked.

What if we all did that? What if, instead of flagellating ourselves every time we took the exit, we simply returned to our seat after the yogurt or the swallows of kombucha and sat down again to write, forgiving ourselves for getting carried away by the moments of terror that inevitably shade the practice of the craft?

Better yet, what if we each staged a ritual of sorts, wherein we committed to a practice like self-gentleness as part of a bid to stay engaged with our work when the fear gremlins start getting pesky? And what if we continually reminded ourselves that we are in no clear or present danger, but rather just grappling with the discomfort of showing up for one of the most potentially enriching human endeavors there is?

I invite you to give some thought to the exits you take when your fear causes you to feel blocked. I invite you to find a way back to your writing seat again and again, by reaffirming your basic okayness, by gentling your self-talk, and by learning to forgive yourself when you jump the rails.

Because: if you’re called to the work, you’ve got to make it back to the craft.