How to Break Writers’ Block
I stopped writing for almost a decade. It wasn’t parenthood, or juggling a full-time job, or even laziness. I just didn’t have anything to say. And I just realized why.
If you are struggling to write lately, grasping for topics, trying to find your way in this creative art, wondering if you should just give in to it all and let AI-created content flood over us all like an inevitable tide, you might be where I was: stuck in survival mode.
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From the ages of 9 to 30, I wrote constantly. Thousands of pages of journals, stories, and poems, largely unshared, a lot of which got burned in our fireplace when I was 19 and home from college. 1999 was a weird time. I digress.
Anyway, I was thinking, in the past year I have written hundreds and hundreds of pages, largely unshared, and as I comb through them, trying to figure out what to make of all of this work, I realized that I have a truly dumbfoundingly, exhausting amount of thoughts. But, like explaining dreams, unsatisfactory to both listener and dreamer, it is even more exhausting to try to tell you about them.
After paying for a goddamned MFA in creative writing at the age of 27, instead of continuing on my way in the writing world, I largely gave it up. From the ages of 32–42, I didn’t write much of anything. My journals are an illegible puzzle, my creative work, haphazard and sparse.
I just realized why. To write is to process, and during those years, most of the time, I did not want to confront most of the things I was thinking. Because I was unhappy. I was professionally successful, and my family is lovely. What the fuck was wrong with me? Inexplicably, bewilderingly depressed, while I tried to navigate a world I still don’t understand, along with twin infants.
Trying to write about it seemed like another to-do list item, and I could not conceive of having the motivation to even attempt to communicate or contribute in a meaningful way.
The years of pushing everything down because I didn’t have the energy to both think the thoughts and articulate them. I didn’t want to experience thinking them, why on earth would I write about them?
This avoidance strategy only works so long. I had a few really, really messy years, and got to that long-sought place of objective-ish perspective, and I realized that the mental health struggle and the creative block were one-in-the-same.
My brain is a labyrinth of trapdoors and moving staircases. It’s one thing to exist inside it, another thing entirely to make it accessible to others. I hate having to both think the thoughts and somehow stay coherent. I don’t do things when they are uncomfortable. I have a shockingly low tolerance for nervous system stress, and I thrive in routine.
I spent a decade in survival mode. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. No one could have helped me through it. I would not have had words to describe the experience until it was over.
Now that the struggle is over, the words have come back because they can. This is why therapy helps. It is nothing but mouse traps and crocodile pits up there in my attic. I’ve always struggled with the translation of thoughts.
It’s not just about thinking them — it’s about organizing them, filtering out the static, and turning them into something that makes sense outside of my own head. But, most importantly, what I was struggling with is confronting the content of the thoughts themselves. Listening to what my brain was telling itself.
It was a really overwhelming experience to let go a little and listen to the noise but ultimately, enormously creatively productive.`
So, wrapping this up, if you are stuck in that awful purgatory that is writers’ block, my number one suggestion, writer to writer, is, given that inner dialogue we all have is seemingly incessant, what are you trying to avoid listening to?
Start there. The words that come out will be something of a riptide, but, writer to writer, you know we live for this.
