Overcoming writer’s block
Writer’s block — we’ve all experienced it, whether we are novelists pondering over a plot twist or students battling with their thesis. How can you snap out
of it?
This year, along with Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow Helena Attlee, I co-facilitated two workshops for undergraduate Social Work students at Glyndwr University in Wrexham. We focused on academic writing and dissertations. The Social Work course is mostly practical, and the students struggle with academic writing. Although they were not taking a creative subject, we adopted a creative approach to the workshops to assist students who felt stuck and help them to work their way into their writing. When faced with a dissertation to write, university students are often given a bulleted list of tasks but this doesn’t always do the trick. People may not work in a linear fashion; they learn in different ways, and sometimes, a left-field approach is better for getting your ideas flowing.
If you’ve got writer’s block, a physical approach may help. I encouraged the students to leave their laptop on the table, move around, walk about — even dance! I handed out pads of sticky notes and suggested they pick a section of their dissertation to think about and write each idea on a sticky. Alternatively, they could take a visual approach and draw or doodle instead. With the ideas down on paper, they could shift them around to play with the order.
At the time, I was in the middle of my PhD in Digital Writing, which involves writing 48 poems to accompany short films for an online poetry and film collection. I was stalling with the critical analysis element. Running the workshops gave me confidence in my own academic writing. I adopted the tips I myself had recommended to students in the sessions and succeeded in kick-starting my own work. Perhaps a case of ‘do as I say, and I will too.’
Related articles
A visual approach using storyboarding can be invaluable for planning a writing assignment
Are you failing to progress with your writing? This enhanced freewriting technique can help you get back on track.
Creativity is a core feature of writing in the sciences as well as the arts.