The last time I was stuck on a story, I took my socks off. It was the final scene of Cost of Living, my post-apocalyptic Troon story, and I’d circled it for three days. I walked barefoot up the garden in the rain (rain being Ayrshire’s factory setting) and came back with wet feet and a way to move forwards.
That walk represents most of what I know about how to overcome writer’s block. To a psychologist, writer’s block is a loop between five things: your situation, your thoughts, your emotions, your body and your behaviour. Change any one of them and the others loosen. This guide is for fiction writers stuck mid-draft or stuck before page one, and it contains a worksheet you can copy.
Key takeaways
- To overcome writer’s block, treat it as a loop across five linked areas: situation, thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and behaviour.
- You only need to change one area to loosen the rest. Behaviour and the situation are usually the quickest to move.
- Write your blocking thought down word for word. It often turns out to be a rigid rule, such as ‘Chapter one has to open with a bang.’
- Use the five areas worksheet below to find which box you’re stuck in before you pick a fix to beat your writer’s block.
Contents
What is writer’s block?
Writer’s block is a stretch of time when you want to write and know how, yet the next sentence won’t come. It can last an afternoon or several years. For fiction writers it tends to occur in two places: the blank first page, and the middle of a draft where the plot stops flowing.
You might have experienced the middle version. The cursor blinks after a sentence you’ve rewritten eleven times, and each rewrite is a little worse than the one before.
The name Writer’s Block is a relatively new term. The psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler coined ‘writer’s block’ in New York in 1947, and blamed it on oral masochism and a ‘milk-denying mother’, according to a 2014 review in the American Journal of Neuroradiology. Psychology has moved on since then, which mothers everywhere will be glad to hear.
The best-known paper on the subject came out in 1974. The psychologist Dennis Upper published ‘The Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block”’ in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, and the page under the title is blank. The reviewer’s note says they examined it with lemon juice and X-rays and found no flaw. In 2007 a team led by Robert Didden repeated the study across several countries, with equally blank pages.
It’s a good joke with a serious point inside it. A blank page tells you nothing about why it’s blank. The next section here does.
What causes writer’s block? A psychologist’s answer
Writer’s block comes from how you perceive the task in front of you, more than from the task itself. Two writers can face the same unfinished chapter. One reads it as a puzzle, the other reads it as a verdict on their talent. The second writer’s thoughts, mood, body and behaviour all follow that reading, and the page stays blank.
Perception sat at the centre of my PhD at Coventry University, which looked at how perception, emotion and behaviour connect. Two people can live through the same event and come away changed in different ways, because what matters is how each of them sees it. That perception shapes how much the event hurts, then everything that follows: thoughts, moods, behaviour and even the body’s response.
The writing researcher Mike Rose found a version of this at UCLA in 1980. He interviewed ten skilled student writers, five of whom had writer’s block, and found the blocked group working from rigid rules and inflexible plans. One of their rules held that a good essay must grab the reader’s attention at once. The fluent writers held looser rules and bent them when they got in the way.
The fiction version of that rule crossed my desk for years when I was Editor-in-Chief of an independent publishing house, reading over 100 submissions a year. Writers are told to open mid-action, so plenty did. The openings I liked best did the opposite: they opened in a voice that could only belong to that narrator.
If ‘chapter one must open with a bang’ is the rule in your head, it may be what’s keeping chapter one empty.
The five areas model, explained for writers
The five areas model is a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tool, developed by Professor Chris Williams at the University of Glasgow, that maps a problem across five linked areas: the situation, your thoughts, your emotions, your physical sensations and your behaviour. Because the areas are linked, a helpful change in one tends to ease the others.
Williams wrote the model in plain English for self-help, and it sits behind the Living Life to the Full course, which NHS Wales offers free. I study and use it, and it suits writer’s block better than any writing tip I know, because it shows you where you’re stuck before it tells you what to do.
Here’s what each area looks like when a writer is blocked.
| Area | What it means | What it looks like when you’re blocked |
|---|---|---|
| Situation | Where you are and what you’re working on | Chapter 14, 9pm, a deadline on Friday, the same chair as yesterday |
| Thoughts | The sentences running in your head about the task | ‘This is rubbish.’ ‘Real writers don’t get stuck.’ |
| Emotions | The mood those thoughts bring | Frustration, shame, boredom, irritation |
| Physical sensations | What your body is doing | Tight shoulders, a heavy head, restless legs, yawning |
| Behaviour | What you do, or stop doing | Rereading old chapters, checking email, ‘research’, tidying the desk |
Williams and Anne Garland’s paper on the model treats the five areas as interdependent, and the course materials point to thoughts and behaviour as the two we control most. For writers, I’d add that we can control the situation too. You can change your chair faster than you can change your mind.
A worked example from my own desk
Here’s one of my own blocks, run through the five areas.
| Area | What it looked like |
|---|---|
| Situation | The final scene of Cost of Living, at my desk, mid-afternoon, three days running |
| Thoughts | ‘This ending has to land, or the whole story falls flat.’ |
| Emotions | Frustration, about 7 out of 10 |
| Physical sensations | Tight shoulders and a headache behind my eyes |
| Behaviour | Rereading the first three pages, then tidying the desk |
Then I took my socks off.
Walking barefoot up the garden changed three boxes at once. My situation was now the garden instead of the desk. Wet grass under my bare feet replaced the tight shoulders as the loudest thing my body was reporting. My behaviour switched to walking instead of rereading. The thought eased by itself, because the other four boxes had stopped feeding it. By the time I reached the back door again, I had the last line.
I do this rain or shine. You don’t need to go full Bear Grylls. The back step works, and so does a lap of the block in shoes.
How to overcome writer’s block in five steps
To overcome writer’s block with the five areas model, fill in each box for the block you have right now, then change the one box that’s easiest to move. I’d start with behaviour or the situation, because they’re the quickest. Small changes count, such as a new room, a ten-minute timer, a deliberately bad sentence, or a skipped scene.
- Name the situation exactly. Write down the scene, the chapter, the time of day and today’s word count. ‘Stuck on the book’ is too vague to fix; ‘stuck on the argument in chapter 14, after 200 words, at 9pm’ is a problem you can work on. What goes wrong: writers list the whole novel. Fix: shrink it to the next scene.
- Catch the thought, word for word. Write the sentence your head keeps saying, inside quotation marks. Then check it for a hidden rule, like the ones Rose found in his blocked students: always, never, must, has to. What goes wrong: you write a summary (‘I’m anxious about it’) instead of the thought. Fix: write what you’d say out loud if a friend asked why you’d stopped.
- Name the emotion and score it. Use one word, then a number out of ten. Frustration at 8 needs a different fix from boredom at 4. What goes wrong: thoughts and emotions get mixed up. Fix: a thought is a sentence; an emotion is one word.
- Check your body. Shoulders, breathing, hunger, energy. A writer who’s been at the desk since breakfast and skipped lunch has a body problem they’re mistaking for a talent problem. What goes wrong: this box gets skipped because it seems to have nothing to do with writing. Fix: deal with it first. Eat lunch, or step outside. (I finished my first book, Mysteries and Misadventures, writing sixteen hours a day during the 2020 lockdown, so I’m the last person to lecture anyone about breaks. The body box still gets filled in, whether you look at it or not.)
- Look at what you’re doing instead, then change one box. Behaviour is the easiest box to fool yourself about. Rereading chapter one for the sixth time counts as avoidance. So does research that stopped producing notes an hour ago. Pick the box that’s easiest to change today, make one small change, then go back to the situation you named in step 1 and write one sentence. What goes wrong: changing everything at once. Fix: one box per attempt, so you learn what works for you.
The five areas worksheet for writer’s block (copy this)
Copy this table into a notebook, or print the page.
| Area | Ask yourself |
|---|---|
| Situation | Which scene, which chapter, what time, where am I sitting? |
| Thoughts | What sentence keeps running in my head? (Write it in quotation marks.) |
| Emotions | What one word names the mood, and what’s its score out of 10? |
| Physical sensations | What is my body doing right now? |
| Behaviour | What am I doing instead of writing? |
Then add two columns of your own: My answer, which you fill in for all five areas, and One small change, which you fill in for one area only.
Keep your filled-in sheets. After three or four, your own pattern shows up: some writers always block in the thoughts box, others in the body.
The same five boxes work on characters, too. If a character reads flat on the page, fill in her five areas and see which one you’ve left empty. There’s more on bringing characters to life in my guide on how to describe people in writing.
Which writer’s block fix works for which box
The standard writer’s block tips do work when you match them to the right box.
Chapter 3 of my craft guide, How to Write Fiction: A Creative Writing Guide for Authors, covers the psychology of writing, including eight approaches to beating writer’s block. Here’s where each one lands in the five areas.
| Approach | Box it changes first | Pick it when |
|---|---|---|
| Freewriting for ten minutes | Thoughts | The inner critic is the loudest voice in the room |
| Changing your environment | Situation | You’ve sat in the same chair for days |
| Breaking the task down (‘write 200 words’) | Situation and thoughts | The whole book is in your head at once |
| Stepping away to refuel | Physical sensations | You’re tired or hungry |
| Mind maps and prompts | Thoughts | The ideas are there and won’t line up |
| Reading outside your genre | Emotions | The work has gone flat and dutiful |
| A daily routine and ritual | Behaviour | You only write once the mood arrives |
| Permission to write badly | Thoughts | Your rule is ‘it has to be right first time’ |
If you try one, make it permission to write badly, because it goes straight at the rule in the thoughts box. A first draft only has to exist. Words on the page can be fixed later. An unwritten page can’t be fixed at all.
For habits that keep the block from coming back, try my top 10 writing tips for authors, and my free author resources page gathers 50 more guides in one place.
How to beat writer’s block in the middle of a novel
Writer’s block in the middle of a novel is often a plot problem wearing an emotion’s clothes. The thoughts box says ‘this book is rubbish’; the situation box, filled in honestly, says ‘I don’t know what she wants in chapter 14.’ Answer that question, or skip to a scene you can see, and the mood usually follows.
Skipping ahead is allowed. Leave a note in square brackets where the missing scene goes and write the next scene you can picture. Come back to the gap later. I keep a list of these bracketed gaps at the top of every draft.
Deadlines make the middle worse. When I taught Academic Writing at Coventry University, the most common mistake among my students was leaving work to the last minute. A deadline loads every box at once. The situation shrinks and the thoughts get louder. My advice to students was: ‘Given enough time, we can accomplish anything.’ For a novelist, that means starting the hard scene on Monday, while Friday still looks far away.
If the block comes from not knowing where the whole book is going, my guide on how to write a book, story or novel covers the wider process.
When writer’s block is a sign of more
Writer’s block and low mood can look alike from the outside, and sometimes one feeds the other. If the frustration follows you away from the desk and stays for weeks, talk to your GP. Living Life to the Full, the free course built on Chris Williams’ five areas approach, is a good place to start alongside that.
Writer’s block FAQs
How long does writer’s block last?
Writer’s block has no fixed length; it can last an afternoon or several years. Short blocks usually lift once one of the five areas changes, such as a new room or a looser rule. For a block that drags on for months, fill in the worksheet every week to see which box keeps it going.
Is writer’s block real?
Writer’s block is a real experience and a non-medical condition. The term only dates from 1947, and researchers have since found it in writers working in English, Chinese and Spanish. Treating writer’s block as linked thoughts, emotions, sensations and behaviours makes it easier to change than treating it as a curse that strikes at random.
Should I stop writing when I have writer’s block?
Stop for a short, planned break, then come back. A walk or a meal changes the situation and the physical sensations, which often loosens the thoughts. Stopping with no plan to return can turn avoidance into a habit, so set the time you’ll sit back down before you get up.
Does freewriting cure writer’s block?
Freewriting helps most when the thoughts box is the problem, because writing nonstop for ten minutes gives the inner critic no gap to speak into. It helps less when the block comes from tiredness or an unsolved plot problem. Match the fix to the box: fill in the worksheet first, then choose.
What’s the fastest way to overcome writer’s block?
The fastest way to overcome writer’s block is to change the easiest of the five areas first, usually your situation or your behaviour. Move to a different room, or write one deliberately bad sentence. Quick changes loosen thoughts.
Overcome writer’s block one box at a time
I’d love to know which of the five boxes catches you most often, and what got you moving again. Tell me in the comments; the best answers will go into the next update of this guide.
Dennis Upper’s page stayed blank on purpose. Yours doesn’t have to. Pick one box and change it. Then let the next sentence catch up.
And if the box you pick is your feet, mind the slugs.
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Stay creative,
Aaron Mullins