James Whitaker
Blocks Are Rarely About a Shortage of Ideas
When a piece of writing stalls, the standard diagnosis is that we have run out of ideas. In my experience, the opposite is far more common. The page is not blank because nothing is there — it is blank because too much is there. A half-formed scene, a character who refuses to behave, a nagging conviction that everything you write sounds like a first attempt. Perfectionism sits on the lid, and nothing gets out.
This is why journaling so often works when willpower does not. Journaling produces writing that is not for anything, which means the internal editor has no job to do. Nobody is marking it, nobody is reading it, and nothing depends on it being good. That freedom is precisely what lets the raw material surface — the images, phrases and half-people that your next project actually needs. Here are four approaches worth trying, plus a way to harvest what they throw up.
Morning Pages: The Daily Drain
The most reliable version is also the simplest. First thing, before the phone, before the news, write three pages by hand. Longhand matters — it is slower, less deletable and keeps you closer to the body than a keyboard does.
- No structure, no topic, no intended audience. If you have nothing to say, write “I don’t know what to say” until something else arrives. It usually does, within a page.
- Do not reread them for at least a fortnight. Rereading too soon invites judgement, and judgement kills the habit faster than boredom ever will.
- Expect the first week to be dull. That dullness is the point: it is the noise clearing.
Think of it as taking the rubbish out. You are not producing literature at seven in the morning; you are making space so that literature has somewhere to land later.
Unsent Letters: Writing to Someone Who Will Never Read It
This one is quietly powerful for anyone stuck on voice. Choose a person — living or dead, known to you or entirely invented — and write to them directly. There is one rule: you will never send it, and you will never tidy it up.
Drop the politeness. Drop the greetings if they slow you down. What you are after is the moment the writing stops performing and starts telling the truth. When you read it back, ignore the argument and hunt for concrete detail: the smell of a particular kitchen, the exact words someone used, the object you keep mentioning without meaning to.
Writers working on fiction can borrow this wholesale. Write a letter as your antagonist to somebody who wronged them, or as a minor character writing home. A page of that will often tell you more about their speech patterns and preoccupations than three chapters of careful description.
List-Making: Low Stakes, High Yield
Lists work because they are almost impossible to be precious about. Nobody agonises over the phrasing of a shopping list. Set a timer for ninety seconds and write as many as you can, without stopping to judge:
- Ten titles you would never dare to use.
- Five smells from the house you grew up in.
- Eight things your protagonist would refuse to say out loud.
- Twenty objects currently in the room you are sitting in.
- Six endings you are afraid of.
Most of what you produce will be ordinary, and that is useful. The obvious answers come out first and get used up, which is what allows the strange ones — the fifth smell, the nineteenth object — to appear at all. Cross out the dull entries afterwards. The crossing out is part of the thinking.
Mining What You Have Made
Journaling only pays off if you go back for the ore. Once a fortnight, reread a batch of pages with a highlighter and look for specific signals rather than good sentences:
- A phrase that carries a small charge you cannot quite explain.
- An image that keeps recurring across weeks.
- A person, real or invented, who turns up again and again.
- A question you keep asking in different words.
Copy these into a separate notebook — a quarry, not a draft. Do not develop them yet. Over a few months you will find that the quarry has a shape, and that shape is usually the thing you have been trying to write all along without knowing it.
Keeping the Practice Alive
The techniques fail for one reason above all others: they get turned into homework. Protect against that with smallness and repetition. Ten minutes in the same chair with the same mug counts. Missing a day does nothing; missing a fortnight means the ritual has grown too large, so shrink it until it fits again.
Keep the notebook separate from your “real” work and show it to nobody. And when a block does arrive, treat it as information rather than failure — it usually means you are trying to write something you have not yet given yourself permission to write. The pages are where you give it.
