How to Deal with Writer’s Block & Create Better Content

One of the biggest steps you can take to keep creating steady content, grow your audience and improve your craft as a writer is to find a way to deal with writer’s block.

The reason this is crucial is because writer’s block can cripple your creativity. It can nibble on your audience and eventually kill off your career.

So, you have to find a way to deal with writer’s block and overcome it completely, before it deals with your career. And, this is exactly what you’re going to learn in this post.

What is Writer’s Block?

Writer’s Block is a condition where a creative writer loses their ability to write consistently, create a new body of work or find adequate inspiration to write as much as they need to.

It is a condition that can be experienced by writers of all kinds, regardless of their experience, level of success or type of work. And it can manifest in many forms including a lack of idea, lack of motivation to write or a total loss of interest in writing.

Causes of Writer’s Block

There are a good number of reasons why people experience writer’s block but in this guide, i’ll be listing out some of the top 4 reasons you might be experiencing a writer’s block below:

Fear of Public Opinion. One of the main reasons you might be experiencing a writer’s block could be due to the fear of public opinion. You might be worried about how people will perceive your work, what they’ll say about it or whether they will like it after its all done.

This is a very popular cause of writing block for writers. And most times, thinking about other people’s perception of your work alone can make or break your ability to get started with it.

Self Criticism & Perfectionism: Sometimes, writers and creatives can be very critical of themselves and their work. This could be either because they are not too confident about their writing abilities or due to previous feedback from their work.

This self criticism can drive them to feeling their work is not good enough when compared to others. And the fear of not being good enough can lead to a serious incidence of writer’s block if left unattended to.

Loss of Interest: Just like any other creative task, you can lose interest in writing about a certain kind of themes or writing generally even after creating some of the most celebrated works out there.

If you’re currently at this point, then you have to realize that it might be a good time to reflect, realign your passion and find other writing or creative ideas that gets you pumped up.

Pressure from other Areas: You might be experiencing writers block because your writing is suddenly getting divided attention and you’re struggling to give it as much time as you used to.

For example, becoming a new parent, working extra hours, taking up new creative hobbies or even moving to a new city can affect your ability to dedicate adequate time to your writing thus leading to a natural reduction in your creative abilities.

Steps to Deal With Writer’s Block

Now that we’ve identified the causes of writers block, the following are the steps you can take to effectively overcome writers block and rescue your career…

Figure Out The Cause

Apart from what we’ve listed out above, there are a lot of other reasons why people feel less able to get creative and write, as much as they used to.

If you’re experiencing this, your first step to deal with a writer’s block is to find out the actual cause of it. Find out, why is it that you suddenly feel less creative or less able to write content, as much as you used to?

As soon as you’re able to identify the cause, it becomes easier to diagnose and apply a lasting solution to it.

PS: Sometimes, it’s not easy to figure out the root cause of writers block. To get a headstart, you can have a peek into your writing history, including your most productive periods, the less productive seasons and possible trends and patterns that led to each of the outcomes you got. This will give you some clues that can get you started on finding solutions.

Find your Why

So, why do you write and what do you really want to achieve as a writer or what did you want to achieve during the period you experienced the writer’s block?

This is a very good question you want to ask yourself to unravel some answers into areas you can comfortably write about and finally deal with writer’s block.

Asking myself this question helped me to stop writing about random topics. At the same time, re-engineered my writing strategy towards thematic topics that matched my goals and what my audience will be expecting at the time.

For you, finding a why could be identifying the things that motivates you to write, the kind of topics that interests you or the specific goals you want to achieve as a writer.

Whatever it is, be sure that your WHY is strong enough to motivate you to keep coming up with great content for your audience. It should also include clear goals you want to achieve with your writing and a projected timeline.

Create a Content Calendar

Having a content calendar is one of the smart ways to deal with writer’s block as it gives you a list of pre-selected topics to write about.

As a content writer, creating a content calendar gets things easier for you, compared to someone writing on random topics or the other person who’ll have to invent a topic, each time they want to write.

To get started, pick up your goals and content strategy, break it down into weekly and monthly expected outcomes. After that, come up with content topics that’ll deliver on these goals as well as match the needs of your target audience.

With this in place, you’ll overcome writers’ block as you’d already have a number of topics in place to write about whenever you’re in need of such.

Use an Idea Generator

One of the major situations that lead to writer’s block is the lack of ideas or content topics to write about.

To get around this and deal with writer’s block, you can work on using content idea generators to get some ideas on what to write about.

A content idea generator will be very useful in a situation where you have been able to identify your content goals, expected outcomes and themes that can interest your audience.

With this in place, you can key in these themes into the content generator and have it suggest possible ideas you can write about, based on your specific content themes.

To get started there are a number of content idea generators you can try out like Hubspot Content Idea Generator, Rock Content, among many others.

Although this might not be a permanent solution to deal with writer’s bloc, you can always use an idea generator as a quick fi approach to get you started with writing.

Try Free-writing

One of the popular ways to overcome writer’s block is to free-write.

I do this quite often. Turns out, the moment I get myself off the first resistance, the ideas begin to come through, in a sustained manner.

As a writer, blogger or creative, even with your content calendar, there may be times you find it difficult to get started on a particular topic. Instead of getting yourself beat up, when this happens, you can decide to free-write.

To get started, get yourself over to your laptop (or whatever device you use). Allow yourself to write as it comes. Keep writing and let it flow.

Do not bother to delete or edit anything initially. As you continue to write, you’ll realize that writing begins to get easier and the ideas begin to come together in a flow.

PS: For free writing to work for you, don’t bother starting with any pre-written topic. Get started on just about anything.

Check out Other Blogs

Sometimes as a writer, all you need is one idea, one push or just about one familiar pattern to trigger your creative faculty to come alive.

And this trigger might be right there on that your competitor’s blog or Google Search Page or just about any other blog that writes on subject similar to yours.

When you feel less able to write, Instead of waiting for inspiration to come, take a step to deal with writer’s block by checking out other websites, books or magazines similar to yours.

Use Google to make searches relating to themes you’d want to write about. Read through the results that show up and find out what it says.

The idea is not to copy up other people’s content. The idea is that at some point during your search, you might find some inspiration or a whole new angle to start your own content.

Curate Content

Content Curation is all about finding valuable content within your niche and presenting it to your audience in a way that adds value to them.

If you find it difficult to deal with writer’s block, using content Curation is a good strategy to fix yourself and get back into writing.

The good thing about content curation is that not only does it present you with content, it gets you to present some of the best value to your audience, while promoting the writers of those content and building a relationship with them in the process.

Done well, content Curation can give you a lot of benefits. For example, your audience gets more value; the authors of the original post can get to share it with their audience or link back to your blog.

In turn, this will expose you to a new audience; get you some better traffic while building you some relationships you can leverage on in the future.

And at the end of the day, you might get to say, oh well, the writer’s block was not such a bad thing after all.

Final Words

As you can see, writer’s block is real. And it’s effects are not only limited to writer’s but creators as a whole. Yet, as a content writer, there are strategies you can use to deal with writer’s block and come out stronger.

In fact, there are ways to harness writer’s block to become a better writer. This and more are some of the things you’ve learned in this guide. But, you can learn even more and find better ways to fix your writing when you signup for our content marketing master class here.

So, it’s your turn now! How, did you deal with your first ever writer’s block as a creative person? Drop you comments below!