At the beginning of January, I challenged myself to follow through with four New Year’s Resolutions: listen to a new album once a week, achieve fluency in my second language, read for leisure whenever I have enough free time, and write daily. Although all four of these resolutions were important to me and served a purpose in my life, I placed the most emphasis on practicing my writing skills every day. I was determined to write anything daily, be it a short story, a poem, a journal entry, or a brainstorm of writing ideas. However, as the weeks passed, I became less and less determined to continue honing my craft as I realized the idea of writing every day to be tedious and overwhelming. As I was running out of ideas and inspiration, I told myself I was experiencing writer’s block, which ultimately led me to give up on the New Year’s Resolution I had the highest hopes for.
Before the implementation of my New Year’s resolution, whenever I found the inspiration to write an article or piece, I would get so absorbed in the work that I found myself sitting in a coffee shop for hours doing nothing but writing and editing, unable to focus on anything else until that piece of writing was perfect in my eyes. To put it into perspective, I would sometimes even come up with writing ideas in my dreams, and then I would wake up in the middle of the night to get those ideas onto a page. This is why attempting to write every day had proven challenging for me; I was so used to only writing whenever I felt inspired, that once I ventured into writing even if I didn’t have any ideas, I was convinced I had a case of writer’s block. However, that was only something I told myself to cope when this new lifestyle proved difficult. The truth of the matter was, I didn’t truly believe I had writer’s block. I internally knew I had placed too much pressure on myself to write that I couldn’t find inspiration whatsoever, resulting in my subsequent burnout from writing every day.
I’ve always said ‘writer’s block’ is a myth. There is no such thing as writer’s block, only writers trying to force something that isn’t ready yet. Sometimes I don’t write for weeks. And then all of a sudden I’ll get a rush of inspiration and you can’t drag me away from my notebook. But I don’t stress out if I don’t hit some arbitrary word count each day or if I go a few days without writing something.”
-Julie Ann Dawson, author of Nancy Werlock’s Diary
Where does the term “writer’s block” come from?
Although the term was first coined by Dr. Edmund Bergler in 1947, many writers frequently use the term today. To unpack the root cause of your inability to write, I believe it’s important to remove this term from your personal vocabulary. By telling yourself that you have “writer’s block,” you are giving yourself an excuse to procrastinate writing with no sole purpose when instead you should be discovering the reasons for this lack of inspiration. While my lack of ideas and inspiration ultimately came from putting too much pressure on myself to write, other causes that have impacted me and many others include:
- The idea of writing vs. the act of writing: Any avid reader or anyone with a vivid imagination has likely thought of a brilliant book idea, creating an entire world inside of their heads whilst envisioning the plot as it was coming to life. Then, when it came time for you to write down all of those ideas onto a blank document, you realized it was much harder for you to express your thoughts on a page than you initially thought it would be, and you might’ve even scrapped your brilliant book idea in its entirety. This is only one example of how we tend to get caught up in the idea of writing, instead of actually writing. I’ve even found myself in this position a few times throughout my life. Although there are so many book ideas living in my head right now, the idea of committing to one piece of writing terrifies me, and I’ve never finished writing anything longer than a short story.
- Self-doubt: As someone whose writing is often read by others, I’ve experienced numerous instances of self-doubt whenever it comes to my writing ideas. The most recent example I can think of was my idea to write an article discussing my thoughts on the 2025 Grammys, which happened immediately after I gave up on my New Year’s Resolution. Although I had numerous opinions on the winners and red carpet looks, I inherently doubted myself and my ability to express those thoughts, because of my writing burnout. Even though I knew how great of an idea it was, I decided to scrap it and not submit an article for that week. I decided it was better to write no article at all, as opposed to writing a bad one.
- Perfectionism: I have a confession to make. Whenever I begin writing a new article, I consistently worry about unimportant factors such as whether or not people will read my articles and/or find them engaging, if my articles have gone up or down in quality, if my writing style is too generic and has made all of my articles sound the same, etc. This has led me to edit my articles for days after I’ve written them and to the minute detail. Although this perfectionism didn’t immediately cause my subsequent burnout, this mindset became more and more tiring over time, becoming one of the many causes of my eventual burnout once January rolled around.
A word of advice from me to you
To everyone reading this article, I dedicate this paragraph to you. Maybe you clicked on this article out of curiosity, or perhaps you’re a close friend or family member of mine, and you read every article I write. No matter who you are, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Thank you so much for listening to what I have to say, and most importantly, thank you, HerCampus for giving me the best platform to continue exercising my writing skills. Writing these articles has been the highlight of my college life (so far), despite the roadblock I faced last month, and I hope to continue writing without putting too much pressure on myself to succeed. With that out of the way, I dedicate the rest of this article solely to those who are either writers themselves or those who dream of becoming a writer one day but haven’t dared to bring their ideas to life.
- To anyone who dreams of becoming a writer or author one day: Do you truly believe every successful author was always as eloquent of a writer as they are today? They had to start somewhere in their creative journey, and they were likely standing in your shoes at one point. However, what separates them from every other person who had these “brilliant book ideas” is that they never gave up. Even if they thought their writing was terrible, and even if there weren’t any publishing houses picking up their manuscripts, they continued to persevere, which brought them to where they are today. You could even be in their shoes one day, but you will never be in their shoes if you don’t persevere through the terrible rough drafts and realize that your ideas will come to life if you give them enough time.
- To any writer who doubts themselves and their abilities: How many people do you inherently believe are reading your writing, nitpicking every adjective you use or your sentence structure? Unless you are a full-time editor being paid to edit a manuscript, I mean it when I say that nobody cares this much. Or, a better way to word it is: nobody cares about anything you do or say, as much as you care. For example, let’s say you walk into your English class, and right before you sit down, you trip and fall on your face. That moment might be ingrained into your mind for the rest of the day, and you might even believe that moment was also ingrained into the minds of everybody else. However, most of the people in that classroom likely forgot about that moment once they stepped foot into their next class, and they simply move on with their life. Now, take this example and translate it into your writing. You might believe that every reader is paying close attention to how you word your sentences or your writing style when none of these readers truly care. At the end of the day, all they care about is whether or not you can deliver a meaningful message, or if this piece of writing added a sense of entertainment into their lives. If you view your writing from the perspective of a casual reader, then your work will be much more engaging to everybody, and you will soon realize the amount of unnecessary pressure you’ve been putting on yourself.
- To anyone who hasn’t written anything in ages because they believe they have writer’s block: Maybe you’ve read this article with a better understanding of why you’ve been unable to sit down, focus, and let your imagination run free on a blank document. You’ve likely realized that you shouldn’t continue being caught up in the idea of writing, you shouldn’t doubt your abilities as much as you currently are, and your ideas will come to you if you continue being open-minded. However, those ideas will never come to you as long as you believe you have writer’s block. I was in the same boat as you last month; I wrote nothing for weeks because I believed I couldn’t. I believed that if I sat down and attempted writing, nothing good would come out of it. It took the realization that I didn’t truly have writer’s block for me to finally sit down and write something. Once I finally started writing again, I realized that for these ideas to come to me in the first place, I needed to start somewhere. At the end of the day, my words hadn’t abandoned me; they simply needed a page to reside.
Lastly, I hope you can learn from my experience and apply this to your own life. Even if you believe you’ve run out of ideas or inspiration, as long as you are writing something, your writing will be brilliant in the eyes of at least one person. As Mary Kay Andrews once said, “There’s no such thing as writer’s block. As long as your fingers can move over the keyboard, eventually it’ll segue into something.”