I Had Writer's Block For 25 Years So You Don't Have To

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For years I’ve struggled with writer’s block.

I’ve also had periods of enormous creative flow. I’ve published four books and written four more. But there’s this one project I could not finish for 25 years.

And I just finished it.

At some point in this drama, I started asking myself: How can I amplify these periods of flow and stop getting blocked?

I did a deep dive into this. I basically spent years reading everything I could find. I spent years practicing all kinds of writerly advice. And none of it worked.

I also did a lot of thinking—not just about blocks, but about what writing is. What storytelling is. How does this thing actually work?

And I started to see that blocks aren’t just some writing problem that we need some clever literary advice to solve. They have everything to do with what’s really going on when we tell stories.

And that has everything to do with your unconscious mind.

The Inner Self

There are a huge number of reasons that you could be blocked right now. I don’t know what those reasons are—but the good news is YOU DO.

I could go over all the various ways we get blocked and all the specific things we need to do to get past them, but writing a novel is a huge and complex undertaking. Even writing a story is complex, and your conscious mind wasn’t really designed to handle that, juggling vast quantities of information.

And you say, “It’s too bad I don’t have a built-in supercomputer that could do these things for me!”

Your unconscious was designed to take complex problems, calculate probabilities, and access information you don’t remember, like stuff that’s floating out there from the MySpace era.

(Secret: It also has access to stuff you didn’t know, before you went fishing)

Taking you into mystical territory, yes. Do or do not.

What Are You?

In order to understand writer’s block, you have to understand what you are.

When you write, a lot of material comes from your unconscious mind. I call it the Inner Self.

Writers usually know this. When we start writing, it’s like stuff gets birthed from a magic storytelling machine. That’s your unconscious mind responding to your stage directions.

Say you want to write about a guy on death row. Your Inner Self goes: Let’s do this! And suddenly you’re describing the cell, the hallways, the other prisoners, you’ve got scraps of dialogue floating through your head, you smell it, you can feel the cold stone walls, the metal bars on the windows.

Maybe you think that this whole scenario came from that movie you saw last week, and I’m sure some of it did, but when you’re a writer long enough, you also know that there is another whole ton of stuff that comes out of complete nowhere.

When It Backfires

Most of us think the unconscious (not your fault) is like an inert collection of junk, like a big old barn and you just go in and fish around until you find the right thing.

That’s bullshit. First, your Inner Self is way bigger than a barn. Second, it’s not inert. It can think, feel, and talk just like you.

Why?

Because IT IS YOU.

You’ve probably experienced this. Think of the last time you had to make a huge decision. Maybe you were going to buy a house and you really weren’t sure it was right. So you went home and slept on it. And the next morning you woke up and you knew—that wasn’t the right house. You just knew.

What happened? I mean, you spent eight hours unconscious, how did that solve anything?

(Secret tip: Your unconscious never sleeps. Never.)

Your Inner Self did what it does: It worked out a lot of complex variables and probabilities and accessed information you don’t even believe you have access to, and it weighed up your desires most of all and came back with a spreadsheet like: “Our calculations show…okay, this is a lot of material, it’s not for the lay reader…but we have a summary here at the end and it says: Don’t buy the house.”

Three days later you’re telling your friends, “Well, we felt the house was just a little overpriced for the location” and your Inner Self rolls its eyes like “You know what—you’re really—you’re not going to tell anyone that was my idea??”

The Inner Self is an integral part of your creative process. It’s alive, talking, and paying attention.

What happens when you’re blocked is that suddenly it stops paying attention.

It doesn’t judge, and it doesn’t criticize. It just pulls its attention away.

What that feels like in actual fact is you suddenly lose interest. You don’t even know why. You’re confused. You can’t make a decision about basic things.

It doesn’t mean you have to throw away your novel. It doesn’t mean you have to start over. It’s not an insult or a condemnation. It’s simply a message, from YOU to YOU. It’s saying: You’re going the wrong way.

This Travesty

Here’s what usually happens.

You say: I really want to write this novel and this is the way to do it. I figured it out. I am so on fire.

And your Inner Self says: No, you really want to write an incredible book that is going to change the world. Remember that? Remember you said that, you know, before this whole mature self-doubt thing?

You wanted to write a book that will literally change the world. You also wanted to make a billion dollars and be on the top of the NYT bestseller list for a minimum of 50 years, so…. What you’re doing right now is not going to get you there.

You say: Wait a minute, excuse me. Let’s go back—I am god. I get to say what happens. I am the Creator of everything in this book. I created the grass and the trees and the characters and on the seventh day I rested—and you cut out. That’s what happened.

And your Inner Self says: Nope. WEEEEEEEEE ARE GOD. And since I’m like 99….never mind. Just, WE are god.

However, your Inner Self is not a dictatorship. You are the command center. And your Inner Self is always, always responding to you.

You vs. You

As writers I don’t think we talk about this enough, this relationship between you and you.

We are forever talking about all the material stuff, like pacing and word choice and how you have to have a certain scene in chapter 5, while ignoring that 99 percent offscreen part of you that is doing the heavy lifting.

This is really what we’re doing when we create anything: We’re developing a relationship with that Inner Self, and that self is so powerful that it can literally turn away from you and destroy your career.

So yeah, I think we might want to talk a little more about what exactly that is.

We have all these really outdated ideas about the Inner Self—it’s a barn, it’s repressed. If you’re religious, you probably need to do something hallowed to get access to that deep sacred thing called a soul. Either way, you’re not allowed access.

It’s terrible that we’ve been so cut off from ourselves in such a massive way. In a way that really matters for creating.

Creativity is your godhood. You are a creator. Even if you’re not aware that you’re creating, at the very least, you should be asking yourself what you believe about this space that is literally 99 percent of YOU.

Crushing the Block

So I’ll tell you how I’ve solved my writer’s blocks. All of them. I developed a few practices for listening to my Inner Self. I’m going to go over these practices in my next few posts.

Here is the first practice: Listening to your Inner Self is the easiest and most fun thing in the world because it speaks the language of desire. Always. Not sure which direction to go? Go in the direction that lights you up. Go in the direction that interests you. That pricks your curiosity. That seems strange but fun—I mean, legitimately fun, what’s fun for YOU.

If you’re partway through a novel and you suddenly lose interest, go back to the place where you last felt excited. That is probably where you got off on the wrong track.

Just keep moving relentlessly toward your desires. Tell yourself what you want and sit in a dark room and wait, because one by one your Inner Self will light a path that will take you out of there with those little floor lights—ding, ding, ding. Each one of those lights is a flash of desire.

In your heart

In your mind

In your imagination

It will feel like joy

Like relief

Like excitement

Like beauty and confidence

Like surprise and wonder and bliss.