How to Hack Your Brain’s Wiring to Get Yourself Writing
The Main Techniques I Use to Beat Writer’s Block in My Own Work
Every writer out there is familiar with one of the worst parts of the job: when a blank page comes to taunt you. Either the words just won’t come, or you hate every single one of them. That’s right: the dreaded writer’s block.
There are a lot of ways people try to overcome it, too, from writing more to reading more to the famous maxim “Write drunk, edit sober.” (Which, tragically, isn’t even a real Hemingway quote, no matter how up his alley it sounds.)
But you’ve probably heard all the most common tips before, and if you’re reading this article, it’s probably because they haven’t been enough.
So, here are a few more unconventional techniques.
These are the biggest ways I tackle writer’s block in my own work. And true to my self-help and psychology specialties, they all rely on hacking the brain’s wiring in one way or another.
After all, your brain’s got a lot of work to do just coming up with all of the stuff you’re about to write—why not take advantage of some of the quirks of its wiring to give yourself a leg up?
1. Open the document, sit in front of the screen, and make yourself breathe.
This is a tip for when your writer’s block is so bad that you can’t even look at your document. Which, you know, sucks—something I can say from personal experience, especially from back in my college days and early in my editing career.
Writer’s block is in many ways connected to anxiety, and when you’re anxious, you naturally want to avoid the thing that’s stressing you out so much . . . even if it’s the thing you most want to work on. Perhaps especially if it’s what you most want to work on—after all, the emotional stakes are always higher when it comes to your own book, manuscript, or passion project.
You probably know how it goes: You go to click open your Word doc…and then you’re hit by a big spike of stress. Suddenly, your fingers are slipping out of the document, clicking back to the internet, and probably auto-opening social media, while they’re at it.
(Social media, of course, being so well known for making people less stressed, right?)
Maybe you see all of the blank space on the page staring into your soul and nope out. Maybe you read a couple sentences, but ugh, you hate them, the pressure becomes too much, and you swerve back—out of Word and into, “I’ll do this later.”
But be honest with yourself: how often do you actually do it later?
One of the biggest problems with anxiety is that it’s cyclical: the more you avoid the things that make you anxious, the more anxious about them you get.
You have to break the cycle.
And in order to break the cycle, you have to get your system to level out. Crank the anxiety down a few notches. Show your brain that no, your own document isn’t going to chase you down and maul you like the tiger you’ve evolved to be afraid of. Show your brain and body that there’s no threat—that it’s safe.
How to do this? Well, it starts with one of the most cliché (but powerful) techniques out there: deep breaths.
It’s that simple: Open your document and just sit with it. Breathe. Don’t beat yourself up about things. Breathe. Sit with your anxiety and keep breathing, and after a few seconds to a few minutes, you should start to feel that anxiety ebb. It will ebb more and more as your brain finally registers that your document isn’t going to hurt you.
Of course, that can be easier said than done. But I absolutely recommend trying—because as the stress and anxiety are quieting down, there will finally, gradually be enough room in your brain for thoughts about what to write.
2. Listen to video game soundtracks
Okay, so technically I mostly listen to Broadway musical soundtracks, because that’s who I am as a person. But video game music actually works better for most people, and not just because it involves fewer dance breaks.
Here’s why video game music so great for writing: it’s literally designed to keep you entertained and engaged in the background while you focus on something else.
As Popular Science reports, studies have borne this out, too. Some of the reasons why? “It’s a whole genre designed to simultaneously stimulate your senses and blend into the background of your brain, because that’s the point of the soundtrack. It has to engage you, the player, in a task without distracting from it. In fact, the best music would actually direct the listener to the task.”
For a lot of people, playing music while you work can be super distracting—after all, what’s more fun to pay attention to, work or your music? But because video game music is designed to help you focus, it avoids a lot of the pitfalls of more popular songs:
Video game music doesn’t have lyrics—which is great, because very few things are more naturally distracting to us than people talking.
Video game music has a relatively low and constant volume, which helps keep it smoothly in the background.
Video game music is fairly fast paced, which keeps your brain stimulated and engaged. This is one reason it outperforms classical music for a lot of people (me included)—classical music can be unhelpfully relaxing. (And of course, a lot of people just aren’t drawn to it.)
For all of these reasons, video game music is very good at occupying the more base-level, easily distracted parts of your brain while the rest of you focuses on the task at hand.
This is the same principle behind the idea of working out while you’re thinking, or having something to occupy your hands while you’re listening to a presentation.
Sometimes you have to give your senses some candy so that you can use the rest of your brain for the complicated stuff. After all, you catch more words with honey.
3. When you stop writing, don’t finish your last sentence!
This trick can be hard to make yourself pull off at first (or at least it was for me!), but it can also massively boost your writing practice. I read this tip a few years ago, and it was immediately effective. ore effective than any other anti-writer’s block technique I have, I think!
Here’s how it works: Normally, when you stop writing for the hour or the day or whatever, you finish off at the end of a sentence—at the end of a complete thought.
Pretty typical.
But! It means that every time you have to go back to your document, your brain has to re-find its place, so to speak. Before you can write, your brain has to pause to take in the last few things you’ve already written, the context around them, remember where you were planning to go with it, etc.
And that, a lot of the time, is where writers get tripped up. They get anxious about what they’ve written, how it sounds, where they’re going, what to say first, how many options they have, and more. It’s a lot of extra mental work, honestly—in a way, your brain has to jump back into the writing from scratch.
It has to figure out the next thought, and as I’m sure you know, that can be real hard when there’s a wall of unfinished text staring deep into your soul.
But you can absolutely circumvent that extra mental work, and here’s how: leave your last sentence unfinished.
The reason this is such a powerful technique is because our brains are automatically wired to fill in the blanks in just about anything. It fills in the blanks in your vision, your memories, and incomplete or distorted information.
So, if you stop writing mid-sentence, your brain will immediately latch onto it in order to complete the thought.
And just like that, you have the rest of your sentence—and probably the next one after that.
When I do this, a lot of the time, the words I want to type next spring into my brain immediately—sometimes before I’ve even finished consciously reading the last sentence.
Give it a try the next couple times you’re writing—I bet you’ll see results, and fast.
