How to write when you don't feel like writing

Aka how to deliver on your deadlines when you'd rather be anywhere but your desk

When writing feels as easy as pushing a dead car along a mud track. Photo by Aubrey Odom on Unsplash

I count myself lucky that most of the time, I love my job. I’ve written stories since before I had heard of the word journalist, and it’s how I’ve always made sense of the world. But even though I’ve made writing the way that I pay my bills, I don’t agree with the saying that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. I do what I love and it often feels like work. Both can be true. Sometimes, it feels so much like work that the writing just doesn’t flow. Now, if I were writing just for the love of it, that might not be a big deal. I could just step away from the glowing screen of my laptop and go and do literally anything else. When you have deadlines, however, and run the risk of ruining a client relationship if you fail to write, the stakes are somewhat higher. So how to get over writer’s block when it’s how you make your living?

Any writer worth their salt will tell you that while moments of inspiration are blissful and when you find yourself carried high by that feeling of there being no barriers between your mind and your words, you should ride it for as long as you can. But those moments are few and far between, and most of the time, we need to be content with grafting away at our writing. Sometimes, however, hard work just doesn’t… work. In those moments, this is what I do.

1. Move your body

It can be hard when a deadline is looming and your stress levels are rising to step away from your computer. But often that’s exactly what we need to spark creativity again. For me, it’s often walking, sometimes with music or a podcast in my ears, or at other times, with my thoughts swirling around me. Other times, I go to the gym and lift heavy weights. In the summer, I might swim. The activity doesn’t seem to matter, it’s the movement that seems to help.

Being outdoors is without doubt ideal, because something about being in the elements, even living in a city, helps to reset our brains. But if the weather is crappy and you really don’t want to leave the house, even a gentle stretch or yoga, or a just bouncing around dancing to music can do it. It’s a way of using physical movement and shifting energy to change how you are feeling mentally.

And it doesn’t need to be extreme physical exertion - not all of us are able to physically able to move our bodies, but just moving as much as you can, while listening to music can be enough to shift our energy.

2. Do something creative

If movement just isn’t your thing for whatever reason, another way you can shift your mindset is doing something creative - maybe painting, playing music, doing a puzzle, or cooking. There are times when I’ve gone to the gym, and tried a bunch of different tactics and things are still not going well in my writing, and I call it a day and head to the kitchen. Cooking is hugely de-stressing for me, except when I am trying to cook a roast dinner and timing several different dishes at once), and I can often return to my desk feeling re-energised.

Doing something creative offers the language part of our brain a rest, akin to daydreaming while staring out of the window, except that we haven’t totally spaced out, we’re just using a different part of our brain.

3. Work on something else

So you’ve moved around or done something creative and it still hasn’t had the required effect of getting your writing to flow. What then? Maybe, quite understandably, you’ve got a lot to do and spending the day dancing or cooking or whatever else is not going to get your work done, especially if you have a cut-off point for work, because you’ve got kids or pets

Working on something else often helps my brain change gears. I might try writing something other than the piece I’m stuck on, or if writing in general is hard, I might look for story ideas or just read pieces that have been published. If I’m feeling a little brain-dead, I might get through some emails or admin - why waste that on a time when I’m feeling fresh, I say.

4. Construct an outline

Ok, now let’s be real. These methods only work if you have a little slack in your schedule. If you have a piece that is due imminently and need to write no matter you’re feeling, this is what I do when I need to bring out the big guns. I write without writing exactly. What I mean by that is that rather than writing in a way that just flows, I sort of construct my piece like I’m doing lego. It’s not always pretty but it gets the job done.

I write out an outline, then an intro, a few points in the middle, and an ending. Then I start to flesh these out. When I do these, I don’t worry at all about the quality of writing, vocabulory or sentence construction. These sentences might be instructions to myself.

So for instance, let’s say I was writing a piece about the why some people hated wearing masks during the pandemic. And I’m writing an introduction in which I use a personal example of how some people reacted badly to me wearing a mask on the London Underground towards the end of the pandemic when many people had stopped using them. If I can’t put together interesting sentences, I literally write like this “Talk about how people were weird when I wore a mask on public transport, and the comment that guy made on the tube. Then talk more broadly about how some anti-mask sentiment was present from the start of the pandemic, and how there were even protests in parts of the USA and Europe.” Eventually I replace these placeholders with proper sentences, but having this scaffolding there helps me get to the finish line.

I have no idea whether other writers are going to read this and go “well duh of course this is what we all do”. Or whether this is a way of building a piece in a sort of paint-by-numbers way that could help you. Either way, this method hasn’t failed me yet.

It’s not what I choose to do first because it relies less on beautiful prose and more on sheer block-building, but sometimes, needs must.

Ultimately, achieving a flow state requires a balance of focus without force.

If you’ve got sure-fire ways that get you out of a writing funk, I would love to know, so let me know in the comments.