How to Overcome Writer's Block When Nothing Comes to Mind

There are two kinds of stuck. In one, you're halfway through a story and can't see the next scene. In the other, you sit down, open a blank page, and nothing arrives at all. No sentence, no character, no idea worth a second look.

This post is about the second kind. It's the more frightening one, because there's nothing to fix, only an empty space. The good news is that a blank page doesn't always mean you have no ideas. Sometimes they're getting stopped somewhere between your head and the page. Sometimes you need rest, a change of scene or a smaller place to start. Most of the work is figuring out which kind of stuck you're in.

Check which rules you're following

Around 1980, the writing researcher Mike Rose studied student writers who blocked easily and others who didn't, and later published the work as Writer's Block: The Cognitive Dimension. One of his central findings was that blocking often comes from rules: inflexible rules about how writing should go, or plans that fight each other.

Most writers carry a few of these without noticing. The first line has to hook the reader. You can't start chapter two until chapter one is right. Every sentence has to sound like a "real writer" wrote it. Each rule is reasonable at some stage of the work. Applied to a blank page, together they make it nearly impossible to type anything, because every possible first sentence breaks one of them.

So suspend the rules for twenty minutes. Write a first line you know is bad. Start in the middle of a scene. Write in note form. Editing is a later job, and you're allowed to make a mess for it.

Make the next step tiny

"Write a story" is too big to start. "Write one sentence about a person in a room" isn't.

When nothing is coming, shrink the task until it looks almost silly. Describe one object on your desk. Write what someone says when they walk in late. Name a character and give them one problem they'd rather nobody knew about. Any of these can be done in two minutes, and once a sentence exists, the next one is easier to find. Momentum seems to matter more than the quality of the first line.

Write what the character notices next

A useful trick when you're stuck in a scene, or trying to start one, is to stop asking what happens next and ask what the character notices next. A sound, a smell, a time on a clock.

Virender Jaiswal's horror story The Rite of Ending on BrightChapters moves almost entirely this way. A student is sitting under a peepal tree at night, preparing a ritual, and the story builds tension out of small things he checks and notices:

"He checked his watch: 12:30 AM.

One more hour."

Nothing happens in that line. A man looks at his watch. But the reader suddenly knows there's a deadline, and that he's counting down to something. A few paragraphs later the story does it again with sound. The crickets, the frogs near the well and a neighbour's dog all go quiet at once, and his own voice becomes horribly loud. Each beat is tiny, concrete and easy to write. Stacked up, they carry the scene.

If you're staring at a blank page, put someone somewhere and write the next thing they notice. Then the next. You'll have half a page before you've decided what the story is about, and by then it may have told you.

Go for a walk, then sit down to choose

This one has unusually good evidence behind it. In a 2014 Stanford study, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz found that walking raised people's creative output by about 60% on average in one of their experiments, compared with sitting. It didn't matter much whether they walked outdoors or on a treadmill facing a blank wall, and the effect carried on for a while after they sat back down.

There's a catch that's useful for writers. The boost was for divergent thinking, generating lots of possible ideas. For tasks with one right answer, walkers did slightly worse. So walk when you need ideas, carry a phone or notebook to catch them, and sit down afterwards to pick the good ones and write.

Don't wait for it to pass

The natural response to a block is to stop writing until inspiration returns. The research suggests that's the wrong move.

In the 1980s and 90s the psychologist Robert Boice studied academic writers, including people who described themselves as blocked. In a small 1983 study of 27 blocked academics, the ones who were required to write on a set schedule came up with more creative ideas than those told to write only when they felt like it, and far more than those who stopped writing altogether. In a later study of new professors, writers who worked in brief, regular sessions logged about 7.3 useful ideas a week. Those who wrote in long, irregular binges logged about 1.6. These were academics writing papers rather than novelists, but the pattern is familiar to plenty of fiction writers.

Ideas seem to arrive more often when you're showing up regularly. Waiting around for them tends to make the gap wider. Even ten minutes at the desk on a blank day counts, partly because tomorrow's page gets a little less frightening.

Sometimes the block is about something else

Not every block is a writing problem. If you're exhausted, grieving, worried about money or work, the part of your mind that plays with stories is often the first thing to go quiet. No technique fixes that, and pushing hard can make the page feel like one more thing you're failing at.

On those days, rest is a reasonable choice. So is writing about what's in the way instead of the story: a few honest lines about how you're doing. For some people, putting feelings into words helps them process what's going on. It isn't a cure, but it's a gentler place to start than demanding a piece of fiction from yourself, and it keeps the writing habit ticking over. If you'd rather talk than type, BrightChapters' Private Journal lets you talk through and record your thoughts by voice. And if the flat, empty feeling is lasting for weeks and spreading beyond writing, it's worth talking to someone you trust or a professional about it.

Borrow a spark

When your own head is empty, other people's work can fill it up again. Read a short story in a genre you don't usually write. Answer a prompt from a writing community. Take a first line you love from someone else's story and write your own version of what happens after it, purely as an exercise you'll never publish.

The Stories page on BrightChapters is a good place for this. The stories are short, free to read with no account, and spread across horror, fantasy, relationships, thrillers and non-fiction, so twenty minutes of reading can hand you a setting, a voice or a question you didn't have before.

And when something does come, even something small, write it down while it's there. A strange paragraph is a start. If it grows into a short story, you can publish it on BrightChapters for free and see what readers make of it.

Ready to put this into practice?

BrightChapters' Write page is free to use, with no account needed to start a draft.