Writing from experience
On writer’s block
I’ve realised that one of the most common reasons I get writer’s block is that I try to write about something that I want to write about but that I don’t have any or way too little experience with.
Recently I took a longer break from work and during this time I started writing more. It was a sort of soft goal with the time off.
I didn’t want to put too much pressure on myself to complete a certain project but I also knew that I wanted to seize the time for some writing which I’d previously put off.
On one of the first days completely off I took my little writing setup to one of my favourite cafés in Vilnius without a concrete plan of what to write about. On that day I wrote around 1500 words and it was all about a single topic: journaling.
It all came about so easily. The ideas flowed out of my mind on to the page. I felt like I had so much to say about the topic.
Background: I started journaling in 2012 and I’ve been doing it every day since around 2016. Coming up on the 10-year streak.
Long story short: this is a topic I have a lot of life experience in. Writing about journaling is infinitely easier for me than something I have no experience in.
How do we figure out what we have experience in? One way to figure this out is to create an unconstrained space for creation. We can start writing without a specific topic or big goal in mind and see what comes out. Most likely we’ll draw from something that we have a good amount of experience in.
One final bit of advice and clarification: this doesn’t mean that we need to be experts in a topic before we start writing. Before we’re experts we can write about the process of creating or learning something which is also meaningful and much easier than starting from scratch.