Two ways to blast through writer’s block

Please allow me to suggest a couple of remedies. In my 10 years as a corporate writing coach, I’ve seen hundreds of people get unstuck using these approaches.

1. List questions from the audience’s perspective.

2. List your ideas as fragments rather than full sentences.

Why list questions?

Writer’s block often comes from failing to adequately “pre-write”-that is, to think critically and do research before settling in to begin composing. If you pause to imagine yourself in your audience’s shoes and think from their perspective about your topic, it can be helpful to simply list questions that you think the audience might ask. This can jump-start an effective pre-writing effort that, once initiated, is likely to flow readily and will feel to you like intuition.

It could be that you have writer’s block simply because you weren’t ready to begin.

Why write fragments?

Another common reason for writer’s block is self-censoring too early in your writing process. Have you ever typed eight words across the page, then backspaced to delete three of them, typed two more, then backspaced over five, and so on? You can work for a half-hour like this and end up with a grand total of four words on the page.