Aidan Meyer

11 Famous Writers And Their Advice On Overcoming Writer's Block

"The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress."
Katie Mather
October 3, 2016
“What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat.’ And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.’”
— Maya Angelou, The Writer's Idea Book 10th Anniversary Edition: How to Develop Great Ideas for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Screenplays
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Muse, Art, Creative
“Put it aside for a few days, or longer, do other things, try not to think about it. Then sit down and read it (printouts are best I find, but that’s just me) as if you’ve never seen it before. Start at the beginning. Scribble on the manuscript as you go if you see anything you want to change. And often, when you get to the end you’ll be both enthusiastic about it and know what the next few words are. And you do it all one word at a time.”
— Neil Gaiman, ON BEING VENERABLE
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity, Scribble
“I encourage my students at times like these to get one page of anything written, three hundred words of memories or dreams or stream of consciousness on how much they hate writing — just for the hell of it, just to keep their fingers from becoming too arthritic, just because they have made a commitment to try to write three hundred words every day. Then, on bad days and weeks, let things go at that… Your unconscious can’t work when you are breathing down its neck. You’ll sit there going, ‘Are you done in there yet, are you done in there yet?’ But it is trying to tell you nicely, ‘Shut up and go away.'”
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity, Encouragement
“I’ve never worked a day in my life. I’ve never worked a day in my life. The joy of writing has propelled me from day to day and year to year. I want you to envy me, my joy. Get out of here tonight and say: ‘Am I being joyful?’ And if you’ve got a writer’s block, you can cure it this evening by stopping whatever you’re writing and doing something else. You picked the wrong subject.”
— Ray Bradbury, 5½ Timeless Commencement Speeches to Teach You to Define Your Own Success
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity, Encouragement
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
— Mark Twain, Great Quote. A Little Too Great.
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity, Encouragement
“The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next. If you do that every day … you will never be stuck. Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway on Coding
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity, Stuck
“Writer’s block is my unconscious mind telling me that something I’ve just written is either unbelievable or unimportant to me, and I solve it by going back and reinventing some part of what I’ve already written so that when I write it again, it is believable and interesting to me. Then I can go on. Writer’s block is never solved by forcing oneself to ‘write through it,’ because you haven’t solved the problem that caused your unconscious mind to rebel against the story, so it still won’t work – for you or for the reader.”
— Orson Scott Card, Fiction Factor
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity, rebel, Readers
“Over the years, I’ve found one rule. It is the only one I give on those occasions when I talk about writing. A simple rule. If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write.”
— Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity, Values, Rules
“I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.”
— Barbara Kingsolver, Fire Up Your Writing Brain: How to Use Proven Neuroscience to Become a More Creative, Productive, and Successful Writer
Tagged: Writer's Block, Advice, Writing, Art, Creativity, Muse, Get The Job Done
“The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress.”
— Philip Roth, The Point Is: Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between
Tagged: Writer's Block, Creativity, Art, Writing, Hell, Works-In-Progress
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
— George Orwell, Why I Write
Tagged: Writer's Block, Creativity, Art, Writing, Books, Exposure, Attention