Defeating Writer's Block

Writer's Block. You have experienced it at least once in your life. If you write often, you have experienced it more than once.

I have had a long bout of Writer's Block. More than a month of staring at the screen and not being able to execute. No creativity. No learning. No value added to the world. Tragedy.

Having Writer's Block was breaking my heart and ultimately breaking my bank account. I had to get out of the rut. I tried many things but continued to fail.

What ultimately got me out of failure mode and back onto a productive track was learned from the movie Finding Forrester.

Just to start typing. If that doesn't work, find someone else's work, and start typing their work until you find your own words.

I had a task. I needed to build something. I stared at my screen for three days. Nothing. I told my wife I had to fix the problem. Luckily, what I had to build had been built before. I just needed to implement it for our system. The pattern was there. While trying to get out of Writer's Block last month, I attacked a problem and copy-pasted the example code. I changed a couple of values, but I didn't understand it. I was still in failure mode. I was still blocked.

As I sat looking at the example I considered copy-pasting again, but I knew that would not work. I remembered the scene from Finding Forrester. "The first key to writing, is to write, not to think."

So this time I skipped copy and paste. I typed it in. Inefficient? Yes, very. But something was different this time. Something had changed. Knowledge and understanding were swooshing around my brain like smoke from a fire. Instead of disappearing into the air, the knowledge-smoke was solidifying. Almost in reverse. The smoke became fire, and then became wood. Solid knowledge. Productivity. Nothing really new was created, it was still just a copy with a couple of changes to make it work for my purposes. But the act of writing got me over the hump.

The creativity is coming back, slowly. I am writing code again and my productivity is greater than zero. I have defeated Writer's Block. So can you.