Writer’s block can be cured, but you have to be willing to do what I tell you. If you can commit to this, then here goes.
Inside your head lives a horrible talking creature called “The Inner English Teacher.” She may look a lot like an actual English teacher you had in school or she may be more of a composite figure. She generally holds a ruler and screeches rather than speaks.
As you write, “The Inner English Teacher” will guide your activities, but not in a helpful way. Instead, she will nag and berate you and throw out confusing terms like “dangling participle” and “mixed modifier” and “antecedent.” If you went to school in Europe, she may even say things like “subjective or objective gerund.” At any rate, her main job is to convince you that grammar is more important than anything. She will also nag at you that your word choice is poor or that your punctuation is in error.
Kill her.
In actual fact, it’s very difficult to kill “The Inner English Teacher,” so you may have to settle for locking her in a closet. Whatever you do, she must be silenced. You must have this completely taken care of before you can start.
Now do these steps:
- Without worrying one bit whether you write well or poorly or if your subject agrees with your verb, write down what you want to say. In fact, try to write it like you talk. You’re not really “writing,” you’re just writing what you want to say.
- Keep on going. Don’t worry about style, word choice, punctuation, or anything else. Just put down what you want to say.
- If The Inner English Teacher rouses a bit, silence her.
- Make sure you write down everything you wanted to say.
Okay, writer’s block is cured. Granted, you may have to go back over these “rough patches” and smooth out some grammar, pick some more apt words, drag out the dictionary, and fix the punctuation … but so what? The hard part about writing is not the grammar, it’s the ideas on paper.
Most writer’s block is the confusion of trying to write grammatically perfectly before you have formulated the content. Content first, grammar later.
(By the way, I’m not knocking grammar and synatx and proper spelling–but there is a time and place for it and it is not necessarily at the same moment you’re trying to get your content solidified.)
Now there is another form of writer’s block–this occurs when you want to write something but you don’t know what you want to say. There is a cure–go and find something to say.
