You Don’t Have Writer’s Block. You Have “Reporter’s Block”
Have you ever been working on a piece of nonfiction — an article, a post on Medium, a book — and find yourself blocked? The words won’t come? You spend so many hours (or days) not writing that eventually you begin to dread even opening your file, terrified by your inability?But you don’t. You likely have a different problem. Nine times out of ten, you’re suffering from what I call “reporter’s block”. You’re having trouble writing not because you can’t find the right words, but because you don’t know what you’re trying to say. You don’t have the right facts at hand. So the solution is to gather more facts. You need to step away from the keyboard, stop trying to write, and do some more reporting: Make phone calls to some new sources, consult new experts, read a relevant book or article. Once you have the facts at hand, the words will come. Or to put it another way, when you’re writing nonfiction, the words flow from the research. If the words aren’t flowing, usually the problem is the research isn’t there. To say something, you have to have something to say. I should be clear that I’m talking about being blocked while writing nonfiction, not fiction or poetry or drama or personal memoir. If you’re writing in those other genres, writer’s block springs from different psychological and literary mechanics, requiring different solutions. I’m not a novelist, so I wouldn’t presume to tell you how to unblock your novel-writing. But nonfiction — I’ve written a mountain of that! For three decades I’ve written everything from long-form magazine articles and columns to books and thousands of blog posts. Even after all that experience, I still frequently get blocked. I’ll be at my keyboard, ploughing through my outline, inputting in all the quotes and ideas I got from interviews and material from my reading, when bang — I hit a wall.
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