Writer's Block Is Fake

Reflections on being a professional

Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash

If I go to a sandwich shop, I do not expect to be told that I can’t have an Italian sub because the sandwich artist is feeling “creatively blocked.” If I hire someone to mow my lawn, I don’t anticipate the guy cancelling because he’s not feeling “inspired.”

And yet, some writers talk about “writer’s block,” a condition where they are supposedly unable to write. What’s wrong with these people?

Of course, it’s never literally true you can’t write. It’s easy to sit down at a computer and push your fingers into the keyboard. For that matter, it’s easy to push a pen around a page, but this does not mean you can draw. I have been lousy at drawing my entire life. I have no understanding of perspective or proportion; my lines go everywhere. When I watch someone draw something and it looks like the thing it’s supposed to look like, I might as well be witnessing alchemy.

That is to say, sometimes people struggle to write, just as I struggle to draw, because they don’t know how. They were never taught, their teachers didn’t give them enough instruction, or maybe they weren’t paying attention. These people are often in school and get asked to write essays — in other words, they are asked to do something they can’t really do. It’s no wonder so many of them turn to ChatGPT.

Another version of this can afflict someone who knows a little bit about writing and has read widely, but can’t produce the kind of writing they think they should be able to. This was me. When I was getting my BFA in fiction, I would find myself unable to do basic fiction-writer things, like describing someone’s face or detailing how a character traveled to work. When I read stories and novels I admired, that kind of logistical prose seemed to flow so naturally, but when I sat down to do it myself it was impossible to replicate. My phrasing would turn labored and awkward; my efforts and “actual” fiction was so vast I wouldn’t be able to read my own work without an intense feeling of shame. Everything I wrote seemed to lack confidence and sincerity. I was not very good at navigating those feelings of inadequacy, because I was, like, 19 years old, but I was also sort of correct in that my work was not very polished. Part of the problem was that almost nothing interesting had happened in my life (again, I was 19), so I didn’t have many stories to write¹, but I was also not a very good writer.

As I got older I became a better writer, which is to say I got faster, my prose got cleaner, and I began to realize what made an idea or a story interesting to a reader. I’m convinced that in 99 percent of cases where someone “suffers” from “writer’s block,” the problem is that they don’t really know what they are sitting down to write — the idea is in their head but it is fuzzy, abstract, and can’t be easily transcribed into sentences and paragraphs.

When you have a clear story to tell, writing is typically easy. This is why journalists, as a rule, do not have writer’s block. The hard part of the job is the reporting, going out into the world to get the story. Once they have it, the writing is merely a matter of sitting down to type it out: A politician is accused of bribery. A restaurant has opened or closed. A new study says almonds are good for you. There are sometimes legal or fact-checking hurdles to clear, and longer stories can present problems of structure and flow, but short-form news writing is a piece of cake for any relatively competent writer.

Occasionally I will come across a post on Substack — a platform full of people obsessed with the aesthetics of writing — that says writers should slow down, that you don’t need to feed the content beast constantly, that you can establish a writing practice without placing too many demands on yourself. This is fine advice, for amateurs. If you make money from writing or aspire to, you actually do need to be able to perform your job. This is especially true if you think of yourself as an “essayist” — that is, your thoughts are so good that other people should pay you for them. If the value you create isn’t through reporting but pure sitting-at-your-desk insight, then those insights better be pretty fucking good and you better have a shitload of them five days a week!

One thing about being a professional writer (or an artist, or any “creative type”) is that you should always have more ideas than you have time to produce. If someone asks you what you are working on or what your dream project is, you should have an obvious answer — it is your job to have ideas! If this seems like an unfair demand, it’s because being a writer is a difficult job.

I have a memory of a writer for the Onion coming to visit my college writing class in 2006 or ‘07 and telling us that pretty much everyone assumed that he had the perfect job². And yes, it was a great job, he told us, a lot of the time he had fun writing jokes for a living. But he also had to write jokes when he wasn’t having fun — when you’re a comedy writer you have to come up with jokes on days when your kid is sick or your dog has recently died or you’re fighting with your girlfriend.

His point was that many people love being creative when the mood strikes them, but this is not the same thing as being creative on demand for money. You might paint still lifes as a way to unwind or write poetry to access your feelings. For that matter, a lot of people like to cook for themselves and their families, or find gardening meditative — but those people have no desire to work the line at a busy diner or join a landscaping crew.

I loved writing before it became my profession, but there’s a difference between being passionate about something and being paid for it. Everyone knows that to become a professional writer you need to have some combination of talent, hard work, and luck. But even if you get to the point of being able to call yourself a professional writer, you have to show up for work. Like any job, it is a grind, and much of the time you aren’t even writing but attending to a dozen administrative tasks — asking someone if you can write for them, sending emails to schedule interviews, compiling notes, formatting something in a CMS, managing whatever social media presence you are required to have. When you actually get a stretch where you can sit down in front of a blank page, that is a treat. Those are the moments you savor. You should, if you call yourself a professional, be able to write when you have the opportunity to do so.

No one does their job perfectly all the time. What ultimately cures writer’s block is the realization that not everything you write has to be the best thing you’ve ever written. If you write for a living you will produce so, so many pieces about so many topics and some of those pieces will be partially or wholly phoned in or you will be writing them on extreme deadline pressure or you will just not have your fastball for whatever reason. But you can’t not write for the same reason a barista can’t just not show up for work. This is what being a professional writer means: Your passion for the art form is subsumed by the needs of your employer.

Maybe that means the creative spark you had when you were younger is diminished, which is the trade off. I think some novelists, for instance, prefer to have a day job that doesn’t involve writing at all so that they can keep their minds fresh for their fiction. This opens the door for the possibility that their writing could become more of a hobby as they age, that their rigorous practice of sitting down for hours every day in front of their computer could fade as their day job becomes more demanding or their family obligations increase. This is, I suspect, the kind of person for whom “writer’s block” is real. They don’t need to write, after all, and maybe they have better things to do, or maybe the joy has faded a little bit for them, which sometimes happens. There is no shame in that. Maybe they were mostly readers this whole time, and what a wonderful thing to be.

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1. This is a good reason not to get a BFA in fiction, by the way.

2. I’ve tried to fact-check this memory before because I want to credit the person who gave this talk or find a transcript of it but I haven’t been able to. So I could be having a false memory, you never know.