30 Ways to Tackle Writer’s Block - Ep. 107

PhD Talk

Another bonus episode!
We’ve all been in this awful situation: you need to write a paper or work on a chapter of your dissertation, but 20 minutes pass, and you can’t write anything. You go surf the internet for a little bit, return to your white screen and blinking cursor, and quickly get sucked into the internet again. Suddenly it is 5pm and you have not done anything. An entire day wasted without doing anything…

Writer’s block – it can strike us all at any given time.

If you feel that your writing is not moving anywhere, don’t sit through the day hoping that things will change. Take action, make some course-corrections, and save the remaining hours of your day.

Here is a list of 30 things you can try to get your juices flowing again:

1. Reuse some old material

Your first draft is not the paper that you are going to submit. Feel free to copy and paste some material from a previous paper or report, and start from there. I usually write down the research steps that I followed in a research report, and use that as the rough basis for my papers. Not using research reports? How about browsing through your lab book and just typing out some of the material that is in there? You will edit later anyway.

2. Go for a walk

If you look at the habits of highly creative people from the past, you will see that almost all of them made time to go for a walk and sort out their thoughts during the day. So, leave your desk and enjoy a brisk walk around campus.

3. Try pen and paper instead

Are the internetz distracting you too much? Why not ditching the text processor software, and writing by hand? Some (older) researchers still write their papers entirely by hand first, and then either type up the material themselves or give it to a secretary/typist. Since most of us don’t have a typist handy, you might have to type it up afterwards, but really, just typing goes super fast. Typing is a different action than writing.

4. Talk out loud

Stuck on forming sentences? Why don’t you try talking out loud instead? Talk to a friend or office mate, or even an imaginary friend and explain what your paper is going to be about. Try the same technique when you can’t find the right words for a sentence: just talk out loud: “What I want to say here in my own words is,… “.

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