I used to think writer’s block was a punishment.
I thought it was a divine slap on the wrist for not being disciplined enough, smart enough, or effortlessly genius. It’s so frustrating. Gosh, it is so frustrating, all-consuming in a way urging me to mercilessly rage at my defenseless keyboard, to claw at the faultlessly provoking blinking cursor with the agony of a rabid animal. Yet, in the same breath, it leaves me hollow. It makes me want to simultaneously slump into a nothingness both deafening and dull.
Here I sit, Lana wisping upon my eardrums in a distant, tragic echo, a prayer of hope plaguing my mind for melodrama and melancholia to spill from the lyrics and synth and drip into my fingertips. I reach for inspiration, a rope inching further just beyond grasp, and then, like clockwork and what pesters like fate, it hits me.
This is the point.
I am meant to be blocked, and so are you.
Writer’s block is not a dead end. It is a detour. It is a soft signal from your mind, perhaps even your soul, pleading for you to pause because you have been too loud and too fast and too demanding. You cannot wrestle good writing out of silence. You must sit with it, and you must listen.
To write is not to always pour. It is not to always produce. It is to press your ear against the earth and wait. Sometimes there is silence, other times static. But sometimes, if you are quiet enough for long enough, there is a faint whisper of something that rumbles your nerves and lights a nimble spark in your mind.
Nothing is inherently linear. Art, growth, and life are all things that fold in on itself. I know this, as I am sure you do as well, and still, I expect of myself a divine consistency. I expect Pulitzer-worthy prose on a Thursday morning when I can’t even find the will to open a new document. I know you have been there, too.
Acknowledging that does not dampen the sting. The dissatisfaction still itches beneath the skin, a muffled buzz of inadequacy clinging even when you have reasoned your way around it.
So, what then? What can we do when the well runs dry and we are left staring into the void with nothing but a cursor winking in RBG and blemished pride?
You’re about to find out.
1. Read.
Read and read and read. Read until it becomes your ritual, refuge, and rebellion. Open the spine of a book as if it is the door to someone else’s home, and step in barefoot. Feel the raw grain of the floorboards. Take notice of the spots adorning chipping paint. Tolerate the stain of words sinking into your fingerprints and merging with your blood.
They say to read whatever you can get your hands on—the brilliant, the terrible, the ancient, the ametuer—and perhaps that is true. There is value in even the clumsy, in prose that limps and stumbles, if only to teach us what not to do, but I have always believed in something more mellow: you write what you read.
So, I read with intention. I read, not for the sake of volume, but for saturation. I read prose that makes my chest tighten with wonder and eyes marvel with stars. I read stories that ruin me in the best possible way. I search for an addicting coalescence of craft and content, books both beautiful and brutal, tender and fierce. When I do so, my own writing begins to transfigure underneath me and metamorphoses into something finer, closer to the art I ceaselessly ache to set on fire.
Let the books you choose be a mirror. Allow them to show you the contours of the writer you aspire to become.
Definitely read, but read what moves you, stirs the marrow, makes you look up mid-sentence and whisper, “God, I want to write something like that.”
2. Make a playlist.
Make it with the heart and hand of a painter blending colours: intuitively, instinctively, and imperfectly. Base it on what you feel inspired to write, or don’t. Base it on how the sky looked yesterday evening, or the sound of your mind’s voice at midnight, or the way it feels to enter a room full of strangers who bear the weight of lifelong stories you have no clue of. Make it make sense, or have it be chaos. It can be crafted to cradle a single mood, genre, or story, or just let it spiral. Whatever it is, just make sure it is yours.
Then, listen to it.
I don’t mean as background noise. Listen to it with your soul in a manner verging on devotional. Listen to the bare meaning of the lyrics, the rise and fall of syllables, the tenderness in a voice cracking ever so slightly during the bridge. These words are an art form which have been carved into sound waves and set free into the medium we call air. They speak to the same part of you that wants to write but doesn’t yet know how.
Music does not simply fill the silence but transforms it. You just have to figure out what you want the silence to become.
3. Give yourself a new experience.
It is easiest to write what you know, so give yourself more to know.
We are creatures of pattern, and yet, the soul of a writer is hungry for contrast and novelty and the quiver of unknown possibilities brushing against the margins of routine. Do something. Anything. Take the long way home. Eat alone in a restaurant and watch the world go on through a window. Say yes when you are used to saying no.
Or perhaps go somewhere you have never been, even if it is just a different corner of the city. Do that thing you have been avoiding, fearing, dreaming about in passing moments. Take a class on something absurd. Run a marathon (or half). Learn the clarinet or kazoo. Try pottery. Let your hands fail at something your heart is curious about.
The more you open yourself up to different, random, slightly crazy experiences, the more you are quietly expanding the archive, the invisible shelf in your mind where your snippets of life are stored: the awkward firsts and change of seasons and scents holding more emotion than you can brace. The place housing the fevers of trying something and not quite getting it right.
These are the things we draw from when the page is empty. These small, unspectacular instances of living are your muse. You never know when a seemingly ordinary day will become the paragraph saving your story.
Give yourself something to remember and something to write toward.
4. wait for the rain
Truly, wait.
Isn’t it miraculous, the way it comes? Not asked for, not summoned, but arriving anyway with unspoken permission from the clouds. It feeds the earth and our soul. Rain is not just weather, but mood, memory, and muse.
There is something in the hush it casts over the world—the softened footsteps, the blur of streaked windows, the way everything feels suspended in the rush of it all and damp with petrichor—that I savour with my entire being. So, I wait.
I don’t write until it rains.
Sometimes that means hours, other times days or weeks. I let the anticipation bloom in my chest, allowing it to gather just as the clouds themselves. I hold off and stay still, and when the rain does come, when it taps upon the glass like a lover pleading to be let in, I write.
Not perfectly, and definitely not always with clarity, but with release.
Even if I am still blocked, even if the sentences come in pieces and start mid-thought, I write. Because rain does not ask to be perfect when it falls, it simply does what it came to do.
Perhaps, so should I. And so should you.
5. Take a really, really long walk.
Walk until your legs forget they are walking. Until movement becomes tempo and tempo becomes thought.
Wander through your neighbourhood and pretend it is the first time you are seeing it. Allow your feet to take you somewhere or nowhere. Circle the same block three times. Pace your room till the carpet or floorboards soak in your pattern. It doesn’t matter; this is not about distance, but rather about surrender.
Play that playlist we talked about. Or don’t. Sometimes silence is the only sound that makes sense. Either way, let your mind stretch its limbs and meander. Let it skip and stall and stir. Think about the project you can’t seem to finish. Then don’t. Think about something else. Or nothing at all. Let your thoughts choose themselves. Remember: wildflowers grow wherever they please.
This is not an errand or for productivity. This is for stillness in the midst of motion. It is for the incredibly strange way walking feels like solving something without knowing what the question even was to begin with.
Often, my words come not at the desk, but on the sidewalk, in the rustle of leaves or the muted sound of rubber meeting concrete, in the split second I catch my own reflection in a window and feel oddly foreign to myself.
Walk until the noise quiets. Then walk a little more.
6. Don’t force it.
There are times when I can see it all so clearly. A line or paragraph or whole damn novel, perfect in my head. It shines, untouchable, a pseudo-ghost of cognition waiting to be more. Although, when I try to write it and translate the feeling into a more tangible silhouette, it crumbles. It resists. It refuses.
And oh, how I fight it. I rewrite the same sentence ten times and drag words out like nails on chalkboard. I beg the page to understand what I mean, but it never does. How could it? I am trying to make it mean something it isn’t ready to.
As time went on the way it naturally does, I learned to just let it be.
I step away. I close the document. I don’t chase it. I don’t coax or bargain with it. I don’t tame the words into obedience.
I have realized something both odd and lovely: silence can sometimes speak louder than language. The act of not writing, when done gently, can be a kind of writing, too. A waiting. A promise. A breath held for later.
More often than not, when I return, the words are softer. Kinder. They come willingly, even if they may not match the golden vision I once possessed. Still, they are mine, and to me, that is abundant.
You don’t have to force brilliance. You only have to be patient with your voice. It will come home when it is ready.
A final thought, for now
Most days, these tips work for me. Other days… well, they don’t. The words still deny me, and I am left to sit with that strange, empty feeling with nothing but my own restlessness.
Nevertheless, I do them anyway. I walk. I listen. I wait. I read. I live. In doing so, I trust that my mind—my stubborn, spiralling, beautiful mind—will find its way back to this art when it feels more sure of itself.
So, if you are stuck, stay. Don’t flee from this famine of silence. You are not broken. In fact, I think you are just becoming. Writer’s block is not the end but rather a pause; redirection; quiet call to pay attention to the world again. Give it permission to shape you, and the words will find you once more.
Keep going, keep persevering, and above all else, hold tight to the knowing that even through the mind’s quiet, you are still a writer.