What do you do if you have a bit of a writing block?  Sometimes not being able to generate a sentence is the problem. But just as often it’s not –  you have the ideas but something else is stopping you getting them on the page. And sometimes that something else is a person. Not a real person, well, not yet. You  have an imaginary reader who hasn’t read a word of your writing but has already decided your paragraph is thin, or derivative, or theoretically unsound. What’s worse, the critic arrives in your head even before you have written a word for them to object to.

If this is you, and you have a very judgmental inner critic, then here are three little strategies to try. They all work the same way. They don’t try to get rid of the inner critic. They give that pesky objector an early, specific job to do.

The first strategy is to write the reviewer’s complaint first. Before you write a section. Not a note to yourself about what might be wrong with your writing but the actual sentence your sceptical reader would write in the margin. Your sample is too small. This term is doing three jobs. You have not engaged with the obvious counter-example. Write the criticism in full, in someone else’s voice, as if you are directly quoting an examiner or Reviewer 2. Now this is strangely easy to do. That’s because you already know what’s dodgy about your own argument. In fact you pretty well always know your own weak points better than anyone marking you does. 

Once the critique exists on the page, dealing with it is a smaller task than defending an argument that hasn’t yet been written against a critic who hadn’t said anything.  When you write in a way that deals with the criticism, you’re not trying to produce a paragraph immune to attack. You’re working with a specific complaint. So put the objection first, in italics if that helps you keep the voices apart, and then write your sentence or paragraph underneath it as if you were replying to an email.

The sentence/paragraph you end up with may well be sharper than the one you would have written without the imagined attack, because you have avoided writing around the fear. But even if it’s not that great, no matter because you have written something. And that is much better than nothing at all. 

The second strategy is to invent a co-author who overclaims. Instead of imagining someone who will attack your argument, imagine someone who will oversell it. Let them draft the paragraph/section first. Give them a name if that helps, an appropriate name for someone outspoken and more than a little pleased with themselves. This is the sort of person who writes this is the first study to show and this represents a significant advance without bothering to check.  And just let them go. Overclaiming drafts are fast to produce because they carry none of the hedging that normally slows an academic sentence down.

But a page of confident, slightly absurd prose is much easier to sit down and cut than a blank page is to fill. The editing that follows is a concrete task rather than creating something from nothing. You are not asking yourself what should this paragraph say, you are asking yourself which of these claims I can actually support, a question with an answer you already likely know. Strike out the parts that overreach, soften the verbs, put the caveats back in, and what is left is probably a text that says exactly what you meant, and possibly written faster than you would have if you’d written it starting from a cautious and anxious position.

The third strategy is the empty chair. This works as a kind of rehearsal. Put a chair opposite your desk. Imagine your most persistent critic sitting in it, the supervisor whose raised eyebrow you can picture, the examiner who always finds the gap in the theory section. Say your argument out loud to them. Not read a draft aloud, but actually argue the position, the way you would if they interrupted you at a conference and asked what your point was.

Speech is less risky than writing. You can repeat yourself, hedge, double back, try a sentence three ways before you get it right. None of it looks like failure because nobody is grading the conversation. Argued out loud, your position usually turns out to be more defensible than it felt on the page. That’s because defending your argument in real time forces you to commit to a claim. Write down whatever survives after being spoken and you may find you have the paragraph that would not come when you tried to compose it silently for your imaginary critic.

These three strategies all work in similar ways. They take a vague, ambient sense of being judged and turn it into a voice, an objection, a response. Of course, the dread does not disappear. But it stops being a chasm between you and the page and becomes something with a shape, something you can write more with and about. 

Of course, none of these three strategies are a way to avoid criticism. They are simply a playful way of getting at the criticism early so that you can do something with it.

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