What is Writer’s Block? Getting to the Root of the Matter

Part of the Creative Writing Series

Psychologists Jerome Singer and Michael Barrios followed a group of “blocked writers” for several months, and they concluded in, The Treatment of Creative Blocks: A Comparison of Waking Imagery, Hypnotic Dream, and Rational Discussion Techniques, that there are four broad causes of writer's block:

1.    Excessively harsh self-criticism

2.    Fear of comparison to other writers

3.    Lack of external motivation, like attention and praise

4.    Lack of internal motivation, like the desire to tell one's story

Writer's block stems from various feelings of discontent with the creative act of writing. In academia we learn the techniques, & rational approaches to writing, with structure. There is a format to follow that is orderly, linear, following a pragmatic approach. If life were only linear!

We go to school learning hard skills to be able to complete tasks. The soft skills of emotional intelligence, courage, communication, conflict resolution; all pertinent to effective interactions at work are equally as important and part of the creative process. This is what is difficult for academia to teach us in school.

Washington University psychologist R. Keith Sawyer, author of the book,

Explaining creativity: The science of human innovation explains the process in the brain. In a Time Magazine  article, he explains, ‘extensive research has shown that when you're creative, your brain is using the same mental building blocks you use every day—like when you figure out a way around a traffic jam.’ He goes on to explain the importance to relax for our brain to be able to use these blocks creatively.

“In creativity research, we refer to the three Bs—for the bathtub, the bed and the bus—places where ideas have famously and suddenly emerged. When we take time off from working on a problem, we change what we're doing and our context, and that can activate different areas of our brain. If the answer wasn't in the part of the brain we were using, it might be in another. If we're lucky, in the next context we may hear or see something that relates—distantly—to the problem that we had temporarily put aside.”

~R. Keith Sawyer

So the answer as we begin this journey together to unblock that writer’s block, is to change what we are doing, and to do that frequently!

As a life coach, I help individuals unblock and flow with their creativity. Schedule a complimentary coaching consult today!