What do you do when you get ‘stuck’ in your writing? This is a common writing malaise that I deal with often as a writing coach. The first thing we do is figure out the source of the ‘stuckness’. I generally categorise this into 4 different areas: Habits, Processes, Ideas, Pace. Once we have located where you are stuck, and why, then the solution is pretty quickly found.

Whilst I have spent a lot of my coaching time focusing on processes and habits - because without these we are all stuck - I talk less about the other two areas where writing can suddenly feel like an uphill struggle and the joy has gone. Being stuck in ideas does not mean being stuck for ideas - quite the opposite with academic clients. They have too many ideas, too complex and convoluted with multiple connections and nuances….too few ideas: never.

The idea can be bound up with emotional baggage of course (back to habits and processes here), but sometimes there has not been enough time spent on ideation…or should I say ideation with a side serving of scalpel.

We need to shape our ideas to the right scale and scope for them to be executable, and when they have become unwieldy and sprawled beyond what we can handle we end up stuck. Not able to move forward or backwards because we cannot see the problem is the idea, we start to question our abilities, our craft, our commitment, our motivation. We come up with a lot of reasons why this thing is not getting done and the actual scope and scale is not amongst our go-to explanations. This is obviously a problem that you will then keep returning to again and again and again…because it is fundamental.

One solution here is to go back to ideation and ask these four clear questions: What is my question/problem? What is my answer? What is my contribution? To what knowledge base/conversation am I contributing to? If you can answer these four things, and the scope and scale fit the publication outlet, you will become unstuck pretty quickly. There are lots of techniques for working out these things, but this is a basic starting point when you start to dread or avoid your project, or you turn up and just can’t move forward.

If you would like to access a training I did on how to get unstuck, click below.