“Endings are elusive, middles are nowhere to be found, but worst of all is to begin, to begin, to begin.” — Donald Barthelme
You awaken in a room of all white. There is no furniture, and the walls are impossibly far away. You need to find your way out, but there’s no way of knowing which direction to go. Every time you take a step, a hidden voice that sounds eerily like your own says “wrong.”
Welcome to writers’ block, a special hell for those who write for a living. There is no torture here but the one we inflict on ourselves. There are no guards or wardens, but also no one to help us escape. The only way out is to write.
It must seem strange to people in other professions that writers could get blocked. Imagine dentists who can’t bring themselves to look at teeth, or plumbers who just sit and stare at their wrenches blankly. But writing is a creative act, first and foremost, and that means there are times when the well is dry. The key to fighting it is to understand why it happens.
In recent years, researchers have used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, to look at changes in blood flow and oxygenation in the brain as people write. Their findings have affirmed what generations of writers already knew: writing may look easy but it’s actually very hard.
Writing requires coordination between two completely different systems in the brain. The first, called the Default Mode Network, is engaged when you’re daydreaming or thinking about the future. Scientists say it becomes active when your mind isn’t focused on a task that requires its full attention. The Default Mode is the key to creativity.
The second, called the Cognitive Control Network, comes online when you need to work toward a goal, helping you ignore distractions. It suppresses parts of the Default Mode Network, censoring inappropriate thoughts in favor of quick decision-making. Cognitive Control is the part that self-edits as you’re writing.
Stand over the shoulder of an experienced journalist as they bang out a story on a tight deadline and you can see how this works. They will tap out a few words, stop to delete them, then tap out a few different words and move on. The reporter is literally flipping back and forth between two entirely different networks of the brain — normally at odds with each other — within seconds in a remarkable pas de deux.
For an inexperienced writer, it can be difficult to perform that dance gracefully. Sometimes, the Default Mode gets the upper hand, and the overly excited writer turns in a self-indulgent mess that no reader can hope to wade through. At other times, Cognitive Control wins out, and the result is paralysis. Before the writer can even finish a sentence, their inner critic is yelling out that it’s all wrong, forcing them to start over. After a while, the inner artist gives up.
The solution is simple: Embrace imperfection. Don’t treat every story like it’s going in the next edition of “The Best American Essays.” Just focus on making your article on last night’s City Council meeting clear. If you need to take a walk around the block or chat with someone in the office to clear your head, go for it, but keep it short. You need to just sit down in front of your keyboard and start typing. Take each story as it comes. Every now and then, you’ll stumble on a really good subject and you can work a little harder to make that one sing. But it will be easier because you’ve had practice.
As I noted before, daily reporting is helpful for overcoming this problem because you write so much. But it’s also helpful because the reader’s expectations are lower. Your job is to tell the day’s news, quickly and efficiently, whether that’s about a new movie coming out or an attempted robbery. It can be more stressful to start out at a prestigious magazine where expectations are higher and you get fewer chances to write. News outlets with a faster pace also tend to feature more formulaic writing, cranking out stories in the standard inverted pyramid or using their own in-house blog style with a little more flair. Ironically, working within a tight framework can make it easier to get the creative juices flowing.
At this point, the artist recoils. Surely there’s more to writing than just following some formula. But Shakespeare’s sonnets follow as much of a formula as an Associated Press news story, and no one considers them the lesser for it. If you want to be a writer, you need to write. And if following a formula will help you get over writer’s block, then do whatever it takes. Just start writing. It’s the only way out.