Writing Anxiety & Writer’s Block
Many students experience writing anxiety.
More than anything, it’s important to remember that if you experience writing anxiety, you are not alone. Writing anxiety is more common than you may think, and talking with and connecting with others about strategies to combat writing anxiety will help ease your symptoms.
Strategies to Combat Writing Anxiety
▶ Get support. Correspond with fellow students or utilize the INRW Support Lab to help you identify the sources of your anxiety and overcome them.
▶ Recognize that writing is a complex process. Writing involves juggling a variety of elements as one seeks to say what they mean, and translate that meaning to the page. Because you are having trouble in one area does not necessarily mean that there are obstacles in other areas.
▶ Identify your strengths. Often as writers, we are our own worse critics, but being an anxious writer is not the same as being a poor writer. It can sometimes help to make a list of the things you do well, or work with a friend or colleague to generate such a list.
▶ Think of yourself as an apprentice. It’s useful that writing requires use of a number of different skills and processes, some of which we’ve yet to master. But understanding that it’s a matter of growth and practice, we can feel more at ease as we identify areas where we excel while tackling areas which need more work.
▶ Try new tactics when you get stuck. Often, writing anxiety or writing block occur at particular stages of the writing process. Figure out what your writing process looks like and whether there’s a particular stage where you tend to get stuck. Then do something different. There is sometimes a sense that there is only one “right” or “correct” way to complete a writing step, but this is often not true. The trick is to determine which writing techniques will help you continue to grow as a writer, not to learn to write like everyone else.
▶ Switch to “discovery” mode. Thinking of writing as a process of exploration rather than as a product oriented activity can allow you to try new approaches like brainstorming, outlining, vomit drafts, and writing from the middle out.
▶ Switch to a writing mode that you’re more comfortable with. Sometimes the requirements of an assignment or essay we want to write don’t line up with the form we feel most comfortable working in, so consider capturing ideas and structure in one form, then translating it to another.