As a graduate student, writing is part and parcel of your daily practice—or at least it’s supposed to be. But that pesky writer’s block can get in the way more often than you’d like, generated by anxious thoughts like I don’t want to continue with this article because I got poor feedback from my advisor or I don’t even know what I’m doing with this dissertation chapter article or I can’t get in touch with my advisor so I’ll just set it aside for the semester. Intense academic environments riddled with expectations, competition, and risk often exacerbate these feelings, leaving you feeling stuck and unable to make any writing progress.
While it may seem like writer’s block is some personal intellectual failing, it's important to recognize that these feelings arise from negative experiences with the writing process and are not in fact inherent to you as an individual. Taking time to recognize what is prompting your writer’s block—whether that is a personal fear, a complicated professional relationship, negative feedback from a past writing experience, or something entirely separate—is crucial if you want to develop strategies to work through those feelings and find a more balanced, consistent, and emotionally manageable approach to the writing process.
While they take into account the emotions that many graduate students face in each of these situations, my goal is to suggest writing and brainstorming strategies that will, ideally, allow you to engage with these feelings and past experiences and also develop new habits moving forward.
Here are a few common writer’s block scenarios that grad students often find themselves in and how to develop new writing habits that will get you unstuck:
Negative emotions well up whenever I sit down to write, and I just end up staring at my document for an hour.
Many writers experience negative feelings toward their writing during the writing process, for countless reasons. Externalizing those feelings onto paper, a computer, or even drawing them if that suits you, can help you learn more about where these negative feelings stem from. This might feel like a challenging process to confront on your own, and that’s okay! You have many options for helping you think about the root cause of your anxieties and how you can start to work through them that don’t include writing them down. Instead, try having a conversation with another person who you trust like an advisor, a peer, a close friend, a writing consultant, or a counselor.
Don’t forget to discuss your positive feelings, too! Making a list of good memories associated with the writing process is a useful way to develop consistent writing habits that aren’t associated with apprehension or fear.
I’m always procrastinating and don’t know how to stop.
If your goal is curbing procrastination, it’s helpful to first identify what emotions you’re trying to avoid by avoiding writing. Once you’ve spent some time working through the emotional element of procrastination, set small attainable goals for writing sessions and check in with a friend beforehand to lay out your goal(s). If you are writing together in the same space, have that friend check in with you after the allotted time to see if you achieved your goal. If not, that’s okay! Try refiguring your goals until you settle on what is achievable within the time you allot yourself. Creating an overarching timeline with a trusted peer and breaking down the amount of work into (more) manageable chunks can make procrastination feel less inevitable. Limiting distractions, be it social media or the endless streams of emails, during these sessions is crucial. There are a variety of web blockers out there, but a personal favorite of mine is the Forest app!
Every time I sit down to write, I draft two sentences and immediately delete them.
It can often feel like every sentence you write gets you nowhere, so you end up deleting it, only to try again and come up with another sentence that seems completely wrong or worthless too. But if you delete every sentence that doesn’t feel “perfect” it’s going to take a long time to even get enough sentences down that can be revised!
If this is a situation you frequently find yourself in, I have a few different suggestions for you to test out. First, try two paired idea generation methods called free-writing and looping. Begin with a free-write to generate a lot of ideas by writing without stopping for a short period, say 15-20 minutes. Do your best to get all your thoughts out without worrying about achieving perfection. Then, move into looping—a continuation of free-writing. After the first 20 minutes are up, read your document over and circle the sentences, phrases, or ideas that you are excited about. Then free-write again for another 15-20 minutes, focusing on those specific phrases or ideas. This allows you to focus on the ideas that are moving your writing in the direction you want it to go and extract the most useful details from them.
Second, if you’re stuck on one idea and can’t seem to come up with the right words, try setting your document aside and talking out your idea instead. You can talk to a wall, an empty room, a voice recording device, or a friend. Switching to this other mode of thinking can help you find a way to express that idea differently.
I have all the content I want in my writing project, but the organization is a mess and it’s never going to get better, so I’ll just leave it sitting here on my desk.
For the never-ending writing projects grad school demands, it can be incredibly difficult to get a sense of the overall shape or manage the multiple thematic threads of a lengthy article, not to mention an entire dissertation. If you’re a visual thinker, try this: print out your draft, cut up the paragraphs, write a brief one-sentence summary of that paragraph on the back of each paragraph, and then play with rearranging them on a table until you settle on an organization that results in a more persuasive argument. If that feels like too much work, try using the comment function in any word-processing tool to label each paragraph with a one-sentence summary. Then ask yourself the following questions:
- Does every paragraph relate back to my main idea?
- Is one paragraph trying to do too much by addressing multiple topics?
- Do any of my paragraphs repeat the same ideas?
The answers to these questions can help guide your organization revision by showing you more clearly where ideas are overlapping, aren’t expressed fully enough, or would be more strongly expressed elsewhere in the draft.
I need disciplinary help on a dissertation or article, but I don’t feel comfortable going to my PI or dissertation chair for writing support.
Feeling like you can’t reach out to an advisor or PI for writing support can be extremely frustrating, especially if they know the most about the project you’re working on. If you’re in this position, come up with a list or group of people who you do feel supported by. Do you have a mentor in an adjacent department? Has a fellow graduate student gone through similar difficulties with this advisor/PI, and how did they manage the situation? What support do you absolutely feel like you’re missing by not communicating with this person, and can you identify another person or support system from which you can get that information or support? Coming up with answers to these questions can help you decide the best course of action for getting the writing support you need.
I can’t fit writing time into my already overcrowded schedule!
With packed schedules, it can be hard to feel like you have any time to write, let alone get all of the other things done on your to-do list! Especially if you feel like you need larger chunks of time to write, finding that time is almost impossible. But often the key to managing your writing time is to start writing more regularly. One way to get into a writing routine is to create a calendar. If you have a deadline, you can lay out the calendar up to your deadline, but if you’re working on something like a multi-year dissertation project, sometimes creating a calendar with a deadline is kind of useless. Try starting with a weekly plan. On Sunday, take a look at your calendar for the week and identify at least 5 out of 7 days of the week that you can dedicate to your writing project. You don’t have to spend the same amount of time every day working. Monday might be a busy lab day, so you only have 15 to 30 minutes to write—that’s fine! Training yourself to take advantage of those shorter time slots is important. Once you’ve laid out the time slots that you’ll dedicate to writing during the week, create a list of small achievable goals, whether that’s to write one body paragraph, fix footnotes, brainstorm for a specific section of the project paper, or talk to your advisor about a section you’re struggling with. It’s important to note that “writing” time doesn’t have to be only dedicated to writing. Anything that’s moving you through the writing process in a new direction counts. Remember, check in with your writing calendar daily, and if you miss a scheduled time, don’t worry about it! The point of the calendar is not to add on more guilt, but to help you identify what time you think you can devote to a writing project ahead of time. Missing a day or two will derail your progress.
I received dismissive comments on a draft I was proud of, and I can’t bring myself to do another revision.
When you pour a lot of hard work, energy, and time into a draft only for it to seem like the reader/commenter didn’t take any of that into account, it can feel frustrating, agonizing, upsetting—the list goes on. Take some time away from the draft to give yourself space to process your emotions and decide how you want to engage with the comments when you do return to them.
There are a few different approaches to try out when you do sit down to engage with the comments. You might bring the draft to a writing consultant or friend and have a conversation about how to balance the feedback with your own thoughts about the purpose of the project and how you see it developing. These third parties don’t have the same emotional stake in the writing project, and they can often help translate negative comments into suggestions for revision. If you prefer to work through the comments on your own, you might try writing down two lists side-by-side: one detailing what the reviewer or commenter suggested and one detailing your own thoughts and desires for revision. Engaging with the issues the reviewer had is important for growing and developing as a writer, but the last thing you want is for a reviewer’s overly negative comments to take over your writing and revising process.
Writer’s block is situational—these situations will continue to evolve, and you can learn to evolve with them.
No matter what writer’s block scenario you might find yourself in, it’s important to remember that your feelings about writing and the writing process will always be changing!
As difficult as it can be in the moment, having self-compassion and self-forgiveness throughout the writing process is important. Recognize the factors are inside and out of your control, permit yourself to be an ‘imperfect’ writer for a day, and don’t forget to acknowledge your strengths.
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