How to Conquer Writer's Block

Okay, so my method is a little exotic. . .

John McPhee always made his vivid and one-of-a-kind long-form features seem effortless, but even he admits to the familiar problem of writer’s block. In his wonderful memoir of feature writing, Draft No. 4: The Writing Process, he notes: “Block. It puts some writers down for months. It puts some writers down for life.” He expressed sympathy for his students (McPhee taught an advanced writing course at Princeton for many years) about “their howling cries as they suffer the masochistic self-inflicted paralysis of a writer’s normal routine.”

“You are working on your first draft and small wonder you’re unhappy. If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer. If you say you see things differently and describe your efforts positively, if you tell people you ‘just love to write,’ you may be delusional.”

Yup, that sounds about right. The terror of the blank page (or nowadays, the terror of the blank screen).

My first mentor in journalism and writing, M. Stanton Evans, used to say that the hardest thing about any form of writing is sitting your butt down in a chair and getting started. I have written here on Political Questions before on the importance of the “lede”—that first sentence or article opener that often gets you off and running, and quoted McPhee’s ratification of that point. So I won’t repeat it again. But it usually works for me. Conquering with a “lede” works well for op-ed articles and other short form pieces, it is less useful for longer, more complicated writing projects.

Here’s how I get over writer’s block, especially on longer or more difficult projects. I’ll have to confess to having a rather exotic method, which succeeds in dampening my restless nature that hinders my concentration because I cannot sit still for very long.

I book a long cruise, preferably an ocean crossing with no port stops. It settles down my restless nature, because I have nowhere to go, have all of my housekeeping, cooking (and bartending) needs taken care of,* and I get into a regular daily rhythm, aided by the gentle motion of the ship on the waves, that never fails to heighten my concentration, and enables me to sit still and work through blockages.

And so right now I am beginning a “repositioning” cruise on a ship that needs to move from Asia (I hopped on in Tokyo) to Vancouver BC so it can begin the summer Alaska cruise season. Seven whole days crossing the Pacific! Nirvana!! But even cruises that make port stops can work, as I have a special horror of boarding buses with strangers for local sight-seeing tours (Ammo Grrrl will understand and commiserate, I am sure).

This method is especially useful for longer writing projects, and especially some spec projects out of my normal comfort zone. One of them is actually posted here: if you pull down the “Memoir” menu from the home page, Chapter 2 of “And the Stars of Heaven Shall Fall” was written on a cruise circumnavigating Iceland and Greenland two years ago, though some portions were first set out on an Atlantic crossing from New York to Southampton back in 2021. I never could have done it at my desk at home. It required a special kind of concentration and remoteness from my normal day-to-day life of writing about politics and issues of the day. I’m aiming for a large portion of chapter three over the next seven days. Stay tuned.

A few candids:

Crossing the north Atlantic; transiting Greenland; sailing out of Narvik, Norway last summer.

Of course, I usually write wherever I am, and sometimes a land location can also work to break you out of your normal ruts.

Florence, and three favorite cafes in Budapest.

I think the seafaring method may run in the family. My British grandfather, whose father (my great grandfather) was a working class London policeman, set out at age 18 from London for the Philippines around 1902, having accepted a job as a bookkeeper for a trading company in Manila. He was good at accounting, but didn’t know Spanish, a requirement for the job. And having attested in London that he did know Spanish, he used the three weeks on a steamer from London to Manila to spend all day long learning Spanish from a textbook—a skill he kept up his entire life that eventually landed him in Los Angeles in 1917.

Norman Hayward, circa 1915; the latest Norman Hayward

* As my comedian/magician pal David Deeble likes to say in another context, when I board a cruise ship, I think to myself: “I am someone else’s problem now.”