Writing longhand
Writing by hand is a tool available to you at any point in the writing process. For those of us who use pen & paper, often we think that it’s only what we do when we’re in the note-taking or brainstorming part — that once we turn to the computer, that’s it, there’s no going back. But that pen & paper is always there. Need a new opening sentence and can’t find one? Trying handwriting one. Need an additional paragraph for a lit review about a source you’ve just found? Draft it by hand, then type it into your document. Want to describe a piece of artwork or a photograph or plant you’re writing about? Look at the image and write some notes describing what you see. Then you can pull a few phrases from there and insert them into your document. Real Writing isn’t just typing.
Covering the screen
If you find yourself messing about with what you’ve already written when you’d promised yourself to draft new material, or if your writing progresses at a glacial pace because you want to get each sentence exactly right before moving on to the next one, try making it impossible for yourself to do those things. Cover your screen. You can lean a few sheets of paper on your laptop screen or drape a scarf over a desktop monitor. Set a timer for 10 minutes and just type.
Switching tasks
If you find yourself digging yourself into the mud, spinning wheels while getting nowhere, you can choose to work on a different aspect of the project instead. Let go of what’s stymying you, for now, and move to a different place, one where you know how to proceed. You can try to unpick the knot another time; you don’t have to finish something today just because you started it.
Switching gears
Maybe what needs to change isn’t the task itself but your approach to it. Perhaps you’ve been trying to do something perfectly, and you could give yourself permission to do it messily, or incompletely, instead. Maybe you’ve been working in a really expansive way, when what you need is to work more tightly, with greater focus. Or maybe it’s the opposite, and you need to loosen the grip and invite in some pleasure. What might change in your approach?
Using all three kinds of writing
As I’ve written about here, you can use your writing time for more than one kind of writing. All of these kinds of writing count as writing during your writing time:
1. Write the thing.
You’ve decided what you want to work on today. Work on it.
2. Write about the thing.
There is something you need to figure out about what you’re trying to say. Maybe you realise this because you’re going in circles. Maybe you realise this because you can’t get started. Open a new document, or pick up that paper & pen, and write about the thing you mean to be writing today. See if you can figure out what the block is, what you might reconsider or reframe, what you might still need to read or calculate before proceeding, etc.
3. Write about your feelings about writing the thing.
Sometimes the block isn’t intellectual; it’s emotional. So turn your attention to those emotions. Write about what you’re feeling, explore why you’re feeling it, consider what you might need to do or say. These emotions might be directly related to the writing task at hand — there is doubt, fear, guilt, anxiety, mania, panic, etc present. Or these emotions might be related to something else going on in your life or in the world — you’ve had an argument, you are worried, you are angry, you are grieving, you are excited and overwhelmed by anticipation. Allow yourself to feel these things, and you may find you’ve created the space you need to be able to return to writing the thing today, or you may realise that today is not the day for it. Sometimes, that’s okay.