The End of Writer’s Block

Have you’ve ever sat at your computer for hours or stared at a blank page, unable to think of the perfect sentence to write next, a brilliant word or a riveting plot point?

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

I used to do exactly that. It’s taken 3 years to write the first draft of my first adult novel but one day I realised, I was doing it all wrong.

This year, after a summer of intensive workshops that completely changed my approach to writing, I was able to write a whole novel (60K+ words) in one month based on one simple ritual.

I’m a thrice-published author. I’ve written plays and also a load of articles so I’m not new to writing. I got there in the end but very painfully and now I’m finishing up an adult novel that was extremely difficult to write — because of the content and the process.

My workshops were with the New York Writer’s Coalition. Because of the pandemic, they went online and started offering their classes free of charge to anyone, every day. I also did similar workshops with writer Diana Goetsch who has taught at the University of Iowa’s prestigious writing school.

All the workshops had one thing in common and that thing changed my whole writing game.

That thing was free writing. If you’ve never heard of freewriting it is the practice of using a random writing prompt as your jump-off…