Flasz On Film

Anyone who sees themselves as a writer knows the overpowering frustration of staring impotently at a computer screen and getting hypnotized by that blinking cursor on an otherwise blank surface of an untouched document. A document you wished to fill with words that make some fundamental sense, but the universe somehow chooses to keep empty. Ask any writer and they will sing you the song of their people about how much of a drag writer’s block can be and how it oftentimes comes to define their entire existence.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way.

Now, I’m not here to give you a universal prescription of what you should do to become a more productive writer. All I can say is how I have taken a long hard look at how I work and made conscious decisions to optimize my life and eliminated, at least partially, the well-known frustrations of failing as a productive writer. I appreciate that my observations may do diddly-squat for you if you’re a novelist struggling with writer’s block, too, as I specifically write pieces ranging anywhere from one to five thousand words a pop; therefore, the phenomenon of having to sit down and stare at a screen pre-filled with pages of text I have to then add to, change or finish isn’t something I’m particularly familiar with. I have written longer texts before, but at least now this isn’t something I’ve optimized for. I do, however, reserve the right to come back to the subject at some point, as I may or may not have an idea for a story that could shape up to become at least a novella, but this will be a topic for another day.

What I’d like to do is share a few observations I have made over the years on the way I treat my own writing productivity in the space of essay writing and how I managed to (almost) completely remove the concept of writer’s block from my daily existence. And it all begins with understanding what — at least in my case — writer’s block actually means and how it translates into real-life effects.

I lead a busy life. I have a demanding job, family obligations, a commute, a blog, a podcast and several related externalities that successfully fill my daily calendar to the brim. Therefore, free time isn’t something I have an abundance of, and it has been like that for years. Sure, maybe one day things will change, but equally I live in the world of here and now and I simply don’t have the bandwidth to bitch-moan-and-complain about what my life and daily schedule should look like. All I can do is operate within the parameters of what my life is, push gently against its boundaries and for the most part adjust my mutable self to the immutable characteristics of the indifferent universe, in which I’d like to carve out enough time to productively write a few words every now and again.

What I found is that the quality of my output and the relative ease with which it is produced is strongly affected by the rhythm of the day, my current mental wellbeing and, perhaps most importantly, the quality and amount of time I have to sit down and tappity-tap-tap-tap on my keyboard without any distractions. Therefore, if you struggle with writer’s block, you might want to begin where I did — with a thorough examination of situations where you successfully produced satisfactory amounts of words on the screen, as well as situations when you failed to do so.

For instance, I have found that I have what I call a runway to flow state which is a non-zero amount of time I require to work myself into a productive state where words just pour out of me in an uninterrupted fashion. I can only expect that many more writers will have their own runways of differing lengths and it will be up to you to figure out the initial conditions for being productive.

Hence, I’ve realized — and you don’t want to know how long it took me to understand this ostensibly fundamental concept — that I need at least fifteen minutes of peace before I can write. And this isn’t a fixed number either as I have found that it varies with the time of day I’d choose to sit down to write (it’s easier in the early morning and late in the evening when the noises of family life are naturally dialed down), or with how mentally at peace I am myself. In fact, I have learned eventually that after a long day filled with job- or family-related frustrations, it is often in my interest not to try to write at all. Instead, it is best to take the evening off, read a book, go for a walk, head to the gym or do whatever it is I know that helps me calm down. In short, I learned not to set myself up for failure by trying to write under conditions where writing would be either impossible or incredibly challenging. Why spend calories on whipping yourself up to write when you can spend the same energy working on your mental wellbeing?

In fact, this is an extension of a slightly different observation I have made over the years, which is that a lot of writing I do happens before I even sit down to type it all up. I found that it is way easier for me to marinade with an idea for a while — sometimes a day, a week, or longer — and let it mature in my brain before I can safely sit down and spit out two thousand words about it. You don’t go for a “numero dos” when you have arbitrarily decided it’s pooping time; you go when you’re good and ready and any attempt to take control over the process governing your ability to stage Operation Dumbo Drop in the confines of your bathroom at a time nature did not have a say in prescribing is likely going to fail. We learn to listen to our bodies during potty training, so you might as well learn to listen to your mind and only sit down to write when writing is a biological possibility, or better yet an inevitability.

Interestingly, I have also learned that I can only marinade one (occasionally two) idea at a time, so any new ideas I concoct I end up writing down in a notebook. I know, I know. Stephen King said that a writer’s notebook is the best place to immortalize bad ideas and good ideas tend to stick in your mind on their own, like pebbles in a sieve of time. This is true and I have written down some terrible ideas myself. But I still write them down because the process I use is perhaps unique to me and I prefer to immortalize a bad idea and then see how bad it is when I read it, rather than to forget a good one because my busy and demanding schedule requires me to hold a lot of information in my RAM at any given time and sometimes those essay concepts, little life observations or hooks for review-adjacent articles I pen for my own website can simply evaporate from my brain before I get the opportunity to do any substantive thinking on the matter.

So, yeah. I write my ideas down and only ever think about one I’m going to write about next. Consequently, when I do eventually sit down to write, even though I never pre-plan the article, sketch out the structure, or do anything remotely technical, I am more or less positioned to evacuate my thoughts in one fell swoop and go about my day rewarded with a nice shot of job-well-done hormone, also known as oxytocin. That way, a good chunk of potential opportunities to wallow in despair of writer’s block is effectively outsourced to thinking time I do while getting on with other tasks.

Finally, becoming aware of the fact I have a runway to productivity and I can’t just switch myself into flow state allowed me to realize I am unlikely to do anything productive if I simply do not have enough quality time to do so. And it is important to have both enough time and quality time at the same time. Being generally extremely busy I have become accustomed to using even snippets of time I have dangling here and there to get on with stuff I have on my to-do list, so I frequently use the fifteen or thirty minutes I get between meetings to work on a slide, update a spreadsheet or answer a few emails, but I found I simply cannot treat writing the same way.

Just because I have half an hour of downtime while I sit in the gallery while my daughter is taking her swimming lessons doesn’t mean it is a good idea to do some writing in this timeslot. Often, I’d just sit with my computer in my lap and stare at a blank screen and get progressively more frustrated at the fact I can’t even use my downtime productively while other people clearly can. It turns out I just need more time to switch into writing mode, so it’s not enough to use the timeslots I have opportunistically, but I needed to actively rework my daily calendar to make enough time — usually at least an hour or more — to get anything done.

For instance, on a day I know I’ll be working from home, I might wake up a bit earlier to buy myself extra time before the school run and then inevitably having to switch into work mode. Or maybe I’ll decide that instead of watching a film on a Saturday night I’ll sit down and get some writing done. After all, it’s all about making choices and decisions that set me up for success, as opposed to reactively failing and becoming frustrated with my own inability to do stuff that’s supposed to bring me joy.

There you have it. I learned to combat writer’s block by understanding the circumstances in which it arises to ruin my day and then do whatever I can to either eliminate or minimize the chances of it rearing its ugly head. For what I do, which is writing essays and maintaining a blog, it all comes down to understanding my mental states, choosing not to write when I feel it will be hard to write, finding enough quality time to give myself enough runway to become productive and learning to marinade with my ideas until they’re ready to be expelled. Sure, I might come to learn new things about myself when I finally sit down to write something more substantial, like a novel, but for now this is how I operate.

I know these ideas tend to be incredibly personal, so you might feel like none of them would work for you. And you might be right. But equally, the fundamental concept of trying to understand where your productivity derives from and how it fails to coalesce is universal enough. You may find that you can train yourself to write for three hours every day like a machine and then do some more writing in the evening. I can’t. I know I have at best one writing session in me per day. But the fact I know it comes from the simple fact I applied this methodology to find it out in the first place.

I can only hope that maybe this ramble could help you calibrate your operations to push the needle even by an inch and give you a better chance to accomplish what you want with fewer frustrations working against you. Because many of those frustrations tend to be self-inflicted and it is up to you to figure out how to stop yourself from being your own detractor.

You’ve got this. I believe in you.

This article was originally published on Medium.com on 13th July 2024.