Write 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.
Cover 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.
Switch 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.
Switch 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, because you’re used to working to deadline, you try to work intensely every step of the way, when in fact your project needs you to move more slowly, allowing things to emerge, mature, connect. 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?
Use 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, annoyance with yourself for having agreed to write the thing in the first place, etc. 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.
Take a walk (and then get write back to work)
Get up from your desk, put on your shoes, grab your keys, leave your phone, and go for a walk around your neighbourhood. Let your mind wander, look at the sky, stop at the shop for some milk, whatever. Then, when you get back to your house or office, sit right back down at your desk.
Pretend it’s a presentation
Ask yourself, how would I say this if I were giving a lecture about it? How would I say it if I were teaching it to a class? How would I explain it to someone else? Where would I start, what would need to come next, what would I want to explain, how would I lead my listeners along and make sure they stayed with me? With this strategy, encourage yourself not to worry about language — you can just write it down as it would come out of your mouth, and pretty it up later.
Use bullet points
Stop trying to make it coherent and elegant, and just break down what it is you’re intending to do. It’s like writing a recipe for your future self to follow. Especially with academic writing, it allows you to separate the work of constructing an argument from the work of actually making that argument.
Keep going!
As someone recently said to me, the stuckness provides the opportunity for the breakthrough! It can be hard to know sometimes if the muddle is just part of the creative process or if it’s an indication that it’s time for a break. If your habit is to pause when the going gets rough, try staying with it longer. (This is one of the reasons why working with a timer can be so helpful — it lets you know exactly how much ‘longer’ is.) It could be that you are closer than you realise, and that if you just stay with it a little longer than is comfortable, you will get where you want to be.