A theory of writer's block

Guest post by Anna Welpinghus, Technical University Dortmund

Over the last years, I have occasionally been struggling with writer’s block. It looks like this: I have an unfinished manuscript that I cannot bring myself to complete. When I work on it, I look at one of the many unfinished sections, write half a paragraph – maybe half a sentence, and that is all. I do not know how to proceed. At some point this condition stirred my intellectual curiosity. I was puzzled by the question, which ability I am lacking when I experience writer’s block. After all, I do know the language of my paper and I know how papers in my discipline are supposed to look like. I know the subject matter of my paper well enough. I am sufficiently motivated to get to my desk and start working on the manuscript. Why is it that I cannot write?

In this blog post, I will present my tentative answer to this question. In other words, I propose a theory of writer’s block. While its vantage point is deeply personal, namely my own experience, I think that the theory resonates with many others. I won’t claim that this holds for all writer’s blocks, however. Most probably there are other kinds of writer’s block. I leave open how widely applicable my theory is. The theory is in its early stages of development and I welcome feedback.

Other treatments of writer’s block that focus on academic writing often deal with fairly course-grained dysfunctions concerning writing: for instance, disenabling habits (e.g. Silvia 2007) or paralyzing attitudes towards oneself as an academic (e.g. Valian 1977). Although Valian and Silvia take different vantage points, some of the remedies they suggest are similar: namely to schedule regular time for writing and stick to that schedule. Silvia has detailed suggestions on how to do so. Valian also suggests to get rid of paralyzing attitudes towards oneself and one’s work. In contrast, Silvia does not recommend any soul-searching. I recommend both texts, especially for anyone who finds it hard to find time for writing. But following their advise only helped me so far. The reason, I think, is that their advice does not tackle dysfunctions during the writing process itself.

Start with an observation about writing: it involves a lot of decisions all the time. We have to decide how to structure a paper. We have to decide how to write a paragraph or how to formulate a sentence. In writer’s block this decision making process does not work. When I experience writer’s block, I am painfully aware of the myriad of possibilities of how to say things. I know that not all of them are equally good. I have to find formulations that are good enough to get the paper published (usually my goal), and I do not know how to do that. Since this is a truly painful state, I sometimes end up avoiding the situation. Blocks like these can stick with me for months, even years. Fortunately, they are also somewhat local. I am blocked with regard to one paper or a few of them. I am usually not blocked when I write emails and I am never blocked when I write notes to myself.

What does it take to make adequate decisions about what to write down? My answer borrows from work on epistemic feelings. These are feelings about one’s own epistemic abilities and cognitive processes. (An example is the feeling that you know the answer to a question while you are still searching your memory for the answer.) Epistemic feelings evaluate “the mental process to which it is directed and indicates how well it will unfold, is unfolding, or has unfolded” (Arango-Munoz & Michaelian 2014). Therefore they help us to monitor our own cognitive processes and to decide when to rely on them.

My theory of writer’s block is this: Writer’s block (of the kind I experience) is due to a dysfunction of those epistemic feelings that are essential for making decisions on what to write down. Two feelings seem to me to be central for writing. Let us call them The Feeling of Having Said Things Well and the Feeling of Having Said Things Badly. The former is pleasant and the latter is unpleasant. They occur because we register cues for good or bad ways of saying something respectively. Yet, it is impossible for most of us to explicitly point out these cues. Part of becoming a skillful writer is to learn to register these cues reliably. Call this process ‘calibration’. In writer’s block these feelings do not work reliably: they do not occur as a response to formulations, or alternatively, when they occur, I do not trust them anymore, so that they do not serve their function.

What are the causes of such a dysfunction? Most likely, many factors contribute to it. Some of them will have to do with individual personalities. Some might have to do with language skills (English is not my native language, and I am pretty sure that plays a role). Here I will focus on the possible contribution of social practices within academic philosophy, and to some extent academia in general.

An essential part of calibration of our epistemic feelings is the feedback of others on what we write and say. My hypothesis is that the structure of feedback we receive on our work makes us vulnerable to writer’s block. Here are some peculiarities of feedback in academic writing in the humanities and in philosophy in particular: We work without getting any feedback for a long time. If you are lucky, someone comments on your draft. Then there’s peer review with a verdict: your work can be published or not. This feedback has the following properties:

(1) there is a huge time delay between writing something and receiving feedback on it;

(2) it is often impersonal and sometimes anonymous;

(3) it often points out what does not work, but not what works;

(4) it is often inconsistent across different feedback-givers.

If all feedback you get is like this, you get signals that your Feeling of Having Said Things Well and your Feeling of Having Said Things Badly are not working reliably. But you get very little information that helps you calibrate them better. So it is not surprising that these feelings start to work unreliably indeed.

Not everyone is equally vulnerable to the obstructive effects of this kind of feedback. Many academics receive written or oral feedback on the way they formulate their ideas that counterbalances these effects (e.g. in informal discussions with colleagues). But we do not all have equal access to such high-quality feedback. We can think of lack of access to high-quality feedback as a component of marginalization in the academic community. If my hypothesis is correct, those who are marginalized in the community are particularly vulnerable to writer’s block. That adds to other disadvantages due to their marginalization.

What can be done to alleviate and to prevent writer’s block? If my hypothesis is correct, it pays to think about writer’s block not only as a problem of individuals but also as one of our academic community. How can we improve the quality of feedback on writing? We should be constructive and fair reviewers, but anonymous peer-review, even if done responsibly, will always have some of the features suitable to crush trust in writing-related epistemic feelings. Other measures would be to cultivate joint paper writing and install dissertation or paper writing groups. It might also be helpful to teach advanced academic writing skills to graduate students.

Changing social practices take time. What can you do as an individual in the meanwhile? Quite a bit. As an individual I do not have to focus on the question how to function better in an environment that is not conducive to my writing. I can also take active steps to make my environment more conducive to it. This is, on receiving and giving more high-quality feedback. This can be a difficult task but I think it is often worth it. Another thing that helped me is to stop worrying about how my paper is evaluated (e.g. whether it will get published). Instead I try to present my argument as clearly as possibly to someone who wants to know the argument and who is not assessing the quality of my work. I try to think of norms for professional writing as tools I may use for presenting my argument well, but not more. It is not easy to consistently remain in that attitude. Here is a helpful hack that I came across somewhere: write an email to a friend and tell them in detail what your paper is about. Then copy/paste your email into your word processing program. It is your new paper draft.

All of this has helped me, but, as I must confess, nothing has worked perfectly. I would be interested in hearing the ideas and experiences from readers of this blog.

References

Arango-Munoz, Santiago & Michaelian, Kourken (2014). Epistemic feelings, epistemic emotions: Review and introduction to the focus section. Philosophical Inquiries 2. Doi: 10.4454/philinq.v2i1.79

Silvia, Paul J. (2007). How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.

Valian, Virginia (1977). Learning to work. In S. Ruddick & P. Daniels, Working it Out. New York: Pantheon, pp. 162-178.

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Anna: Thanks for sharing your personal experience and theory!

I think there may be some truth to your idea that the kind of feedback we receive might contribute to writer's block. Earlier in my career (in graduate school and right after), I had difficulty writing because--as you say--feedback from others tends to focus on the negative, not the positive. I think you are probably right that this can give one a debilitating sense of one's own inability to reliably distinguish "The Feeling of Having Said Things Well and the Feeling of Having Said Things Badly."

In my own case, an unexpected solution to this problem was forced on me, so to speak. After my first job (in a large research department), I was hired into a non-TT job at a teaching-intensive institution with very few philosophers. As a result, I didn't *have* anyone to get feedback from--and truth by told, it was an unexpectedly liberating experience. I stopped worrying so much about "The Feeling of Having Said Things Well and the Feeling of Having Said Things Badly", and instead simply started writing things I found interesting in a *way* that I found interesting. In other words, I learned to stop worrying about the aforementioned feelings, and just tried to enjoy what I was writing.

I don't mean to suppose that the same thing will work for everyone--but it may be something to give a try (namely, not getting feedback for a while, just focusing on doing work in a way that you enjoy).

Finally, I also think that a particular writing strategy might help one overcome writers block resulting from the aforementioned feelings. One great thing I learned late in grad school (which basically made the difference in getting my dissertation done) was to *free write* some number of pages each day (say, 3 pages) without any form of editing whatsoever.

My experience is that this strategy is designed to explicitly bracket out "The Feeling of Having Said Things Well and the Feeling of Having Said Things Badly", as it requires one to just *write* and to remind oneself not to worry about saying things well or badly.

Anyway, I'm not sure if you will find any of these tips helpful - but I figured I'd share them just in case you (or anyone else reading) might!

[Anna Welpinghus]

Hi Marcus,

thanks for your comment and for sharing your experiences.

It makes perfect sense to me that both strategies (not seeking feedback and free writing) can be very helpful in cases of writer's block. As you write, this would be consistent with my model. So far, neither strategy has worked for me, though. (With free writing I either fail to produce any text or it is very far away from any publishable text (in terms of readability, clarity and structure) and the problems occur during editing.) I guess this is something everyone has to try and find out for themselves.

[Amanda]

I found this interesting, for while I have had plenty of professional "issues", including issues with writing, writer's block (knock on wood) hasn't been one of them.

Anyway, while I was reading and Anna was describing all the decisions one makes in writing, I thought to myself, "I've never made those decisions!" I mean, I haven't at least even remotely consciously. I always just kind of write, and then go back and edit. Maybe to some degree I make these decisions in the editing process, but even then it is rarely explicit. Idk I guess I'm just kind of a pure intuition writer lol, i.e. "uh...this sounds kind of right..." I'm exaggerating...

I can relate to the negative feedback and not knowing if your work is good. I have become almost completely agnostic about the quality of my work. I don't know what to think when some members in the profession tell me it's wonderful and other members it's horrible. Perhaps this is why I don't bother trying to make things sound good, since there is so much disagreement anyway.

[Daniel Brunson]

"Procrastination isn’t a unique character flaw or a mysterious curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with challenging emotions and negative moods induced by certain tasks — boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/smarter-living/why-you-procrastinate-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-self-control.html