Academic writers can spend a lot of time being stuck. Quite often they see stuckness as a thinking problem. So they go back to the sources, re-read the theory, work out what they could say next. And quite often that is exactly what is needed. 

But there is a different kind of stuck that more reading won’t fix. That’s where the writer knows the argument they want to make but the sentences simply won’t come. It’s as if the document itself has become a wall. It’s as if the physical act of looking at the page has stopped working, and no amount of re-reading will fix it. 

If that happens to you occasionally, then here are five small tricks deal to with this kind of temporary stuck. None of them are about improving your argument, your citations or technical aspects of the writing. Instead, these five work on the problem of the page.

They are, in no particular order:

1.  Move the sentence, not the cursor. 

If a paragraph will not come, take the last sentence you wrote and cut and paste it at the top of a new document, then keep going from there. It sounds almost too simple to be effective. But the thing is that the document has changed. The failed attempts above that sentence are gone, the visible evidence that you’ve been stuck. What’s left is a blank page with one confident sentence at the top of it. This looks like the start of something rather than the tail end of a struggle. 

•  Retype the stuck sentence rather than move it. 

Instead of copying and pasting, get up from your chair, walk around the room, and come back and open a new document. Then type the last sentence out again from scratch in the new document without looking at the original. It may well come out slightly different. And that difference could well be the useful part. Retyping may break the specific phrasing that got you stuck, because you are no longer bound to reproduce it exactly. The version you retype from memory may fix the stuckness without you consciously deciding to change anything.

•  Change the  medium. 

If the screen is no longer the place where you can think, even temporarily, then step away from it. Print the paragraph, or just the last few sentences, and either continue in pen on paper, or dictate the next few sentences aloud and transcribe them afterwards. 

This is not about handwriting being better than typing or dictation being more natural than writing, although some might want to argue that this is the case. Changing the medium means abandoning the document you have been staring at for forty minutes – that document is now a dead weight associated with not writing. The new medium, by contrast, is clean. You are looking at a medium that hasn’t had time to become a wall.

•  Rename the file and lower the stakes. 

Save a copy of what you’ve been writing as notes, or scraps, or something equally unserious. Go on writing in that less serious document. Don’t keep on staring at Chapter Four Draft Three. Why? Well, a file called Chapter Four Draft Three carries the whole history of your writing in its name –  every previous version, every supervisor or reviewer comment you are trying to address, every worry about whether this version is the final one. A file called notes or scraps carries no expectations and none of the history. You can write badly in notes. Remove the pressure for the moment. 

• Move yourself not the document. 

Get up from the desk, sit somewhere else, stand at a counter, go outside with a notebook if the weather allows it. This is not only a wellbeing tip…. It’s the same principle as the previous four little tricks, but applied to your body instead of the page. 

After you’ve spent long enough looking at the same stuck paragraph, your desk and chair become part of the wall too. They’ve absorbed the stuckness the way the document has. Writing the same sentence somewhere else is removing yourself from a physical context that has become associated with not being able to write.

These five little tricks are simply about getting the thinking away from a page where writing isn’t happening at the moment because sometimes the block isn’t in your head. It’s sitting inside the file, in everything you’ve already written and erased, started and not finished, and stumbled over and over again.

Now, it’s important to note that none of these five little tricks fix an argument that isn’t working. If the paragraph won’t come because you haven’t decided what you think, no amount of moving sentences or renaming files will help. So you do need to be honest with yourself about what is going on. But do understand that a surprising amount of stalled writing has already been thought through, planned and begun.  And stuck may be just a question of getting past the wall. 

Photo by Bethany Fidanzo on Unsplash