The root cause of writer’s block

I’m having a really hard time thinking what to write at the moment. How many times have you been down that road? I have found that writers block often comes from getting started. There have been times where I have a thought in my head that is more or less the meat and potatoes of the message, but for the life of me I have no idea how to start it.

Conventional wisdom says you need a proper introduction, then you tell your audience what you’re going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you just told them, and then you wrap it up. I am having a hard time with it myself, but that is the formula. This is assuming that you have more than a couple of minutes to write something.

What do you do when you’re in a time crunch, and do you have a deadline? Answer is you just write. You don’t worry about being perfect, you don’t worry about being grammatically correct, having all the punctuation perfect.

Often times I will just start an email, a blog post, a podcast as though I am midstream with my thoughts. I forget the introduction entirely, and it has interesting effect. One feels as though they are tuning into the middle of a TV program in the middle of the show rather than the beginning. Some shows do that rather well, such as my all-time favorites Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

We fear putting something down on paper, and then hitting the publish button, because we are because we fear peoples opinion of us. The more you do something, the more comfortable you get with it. But the fear doesn’t go away, you simply get used to doing what it is you do with it there.

just this morning I dropped off a very personal letter to someone who is a judge of sorts over a matter of great importance in my personal life. Was I afraid to do so? I was not, but I was nervous signing the document, having it notarized, and then delivering it to the person’s office. Not nervous because I fear with this person will think of me if I make a mistake in my writing. Truth be told, I looked at the letter that I wrote, and they were plenty of mistakes in it. But it was real, it was as though I were speaking to this person man-to-man.

Perhaps that will help the next time you’re sitting at your screen, with 10 million words inside of you, but none of them are on the forefront of your mind. Just write, add an introduction if you need to when you’re done. But just write what is on your mind at that moment. The important thing is that you’re authentic, and not funny. If you’re comfortable in your own skin, then you really won’t care what other people think of something that you write and publish on the Internet.

It’s not like they’re going to remember it five minutes in the future anyway ha ha.