Six Methods for Getting Unstuck from Writer's Block — Drawn from Zen, Reading, Walking, and the Art of Showing Up Without Expectations

I am not sure writer's block exists. I mean that less skeptically than it sounds. What we call writer's block is real — the dry mouth at the keyboard, the page that refuses to move, and the suspicion that everything you've ever written was a fluke. Now, the bill has come due. However, the name might do more harm than good. It suggests a discrete condition, like a sprained ankle, that requires repair before motion can resume. My experience is closer to this: when I cannot write, I am usually trying to write the wrong thing, from the wrong place, or while pretending I am the kind of person who never has trouble writing.

That said, the condition we're calling writer's block sometimes needs intervention. Here are six interventions I trust, all of which work for the same underlying reason — they remove the willful, anxious I am trying to write from the room and let something quieter handle the work.

1. Read

Read whatever you can get your hands on — a history of salt, a book on octopus cognition, a nineteenth-century novel, or the owner's manual to a car you'll never drive. The point is not just to deepen the well for your own writing, although that is a side effect. It is to expand the mind in directions it would not have gone on its own. Writer's block is often a sign that the inner world has gotten too small. You've been recirculating the same thoughts for too long. Reading widens the room. It introduces ideas you didn't know you needed. It reminds you that other people are also thinking — which is, on some mornings, the only thing that gets the page moving.

2. Meditate

I want to be careful here because meditation gets prescribed for everything now, often by people who have never actually sat. What meditation does for writer's block is not generate ideas. It does the opposite. It introduces a small gap between you and the part of you that is panicking about not writing. That gap is where most of my real writing has come from. Twenty minutes on the cushion is not a productivity hack. It is a willingness to let the desperate executive who has been running the show take a seat for a while.

3. Exercise

Specifically: walk. Run if you must, lift if you must, but the long tradition of writers — Wordsworth, Dickens, Thoreau, and more recent ones who would be embarrassed to be named alongside them — is the tradition of walking. Something about the rhythmic, low-stakes use of the body lets the back of the mind work on whatever the front of the mind has been wrestling. Often, I leave the desk stuck and return with the next paragraph already half-formed. I don't know what to call this except trust.

4. Learn Something Novel

Play the guitar badly. Cook a dish you've never cooked. Try to draw the chair across the room. The Zen word for this is shoshin — beginner's mind, the willingness to be bad at something on purpose. Writer's block calcifies when you have been an expert at the same thing for too long. Doing something you cannot yet do reminds the brain how to fumble, which is, secretly, what writing also requires. Expertise is sometimes the obstacle. I discussed this in the Must I Evolve? episode Empty the Cup: Let Yourself Change.

5. Play a Game

A crossword. A puzzle. Something that uses the analytic part of the brain without asking it to make meaning. Games engage the part of you that loves problem-solving without engaging the part that judges. The judging part is usually what's stuck. Let the analytic part go play for a while; the judging part may quietly leave the room.

6. Take a Shower

The shower principle is real. Neuroscientists have a name for it — the default mode network, the brain's loose, associative background process — but you don't need the name. You need the warm water and the inability to take notes. Some of my best sentences have arrived at the moment I could do absolutely nothing about them. I have come to believe this is not a bug but a design feature. Writing demands that you not be writing for a portion of the day. Also, if you've been staring at a manuscript for days, it's time to join the human race and clean yourself.

Conclusion: The Essence of Unblocking Creativity

Six methods, one underlying instruction: stop trying so hard. Or rather, let the part of you that is trying so hard step out of the room while the rest of you keeps working.

One more thing, outside the list. Show up without expectations. Sit down at the page without demanding anything of it. The block tends to break not when you have a brilliant idea but when you stop requiring one. Give yourself the chance to see what happens — without judgment, without a target, without the small tyranny of needing this morning to produce something. Some days nothing will come, and that is information, not failure. Other days, the page will surprise you. It usually does when you stop asking it to. I discussed this in the Must I Evolve? episode The Productivity Cage.

If writer's block is real, this is how I get out of it. If it isn't, this is how I remember that I was never as stuck as I thought.