The 6 Writer's Block Causes Behind Stalled Poems
Treating writer's block as one disease is why the cures fail. A contest judge sorts the six real causes behind stalled poems and matches each to a fix that works.
A poet wrote to me in January to apologize. She had entered our contest for five straight months, then vanished, and her email had the tone people use for confessing a lapsed gym habit: I have writer's block, she said, eight months now, I think it might be permanent. I asked her three questions. Within two replies we had found the problem, and it had nothing to do with writing. Most conversations about writers block causes go wrong in exactly this way: we treat the block as the disease, when it is only ever the fever. Something upstream is always producing it, and until you name the upstream thing, every cure you try is aspirin.
Stop Treating the Symptom
Consider what we bundle under one lazy label. A poet who cannot start is called blocked. A poet who starts everything and finishes nothing is called blocked. A poet who is exhausted, or grieving, or secretly afraid of her own best subject, or simply out of reading fuel: blocked, blocked, blocked. One word, five different machines failing in five different ways.
No mechanic would accept the car will not go as a diagnosis. Yet poets accept it about themselves for months, and the writing advice industry is happy to sell them generic fixes: write every day, trust the process, keep a gratitude journal. Generic fixes work on nobody in particular because they were designed for nobody in particular.
Writer's block is not an empty well. It is a kinked hose, and the kink is always somewhere specific.
After years of scoring entries and, more usefully, of corresponding with poets whose entries suddenly stopped, I can tell you the kink is almost always one of six things.
The Six Writer's Block Causes I See Most
1. Your taste outran your skill
This is the most common cause in poets two to four years into serious writing, and it masquerades as failure when it is actually growth. You have read enough good poems that you can now hear exactly how bad your drafts are, but your hands have not caught up to your ear. So the ear vetoes every line before it lands. The cure is a quota of deliberately bad drafts: you owe the notebook three terrible poems this week, on purpose, no revising allowed. The veto cannot survive being obeyed enthusiastically.
2. The input tank is empty
Ask a blocked poet what they have read this month and watch the pause. Poems are made substantially out of other poems, not because we copy but because reading keeps the internal language hot. If you have written nothing in six weeks and read nothing in twelve, the arithmetic explains itself. Cure: a two-week reading binge, no writing required, one collection cover to cover, out loud where possible.
3. You are forcing the wrong poem
Sometimes the block guards a door. You keep sitting down to write the safe poem, the one about the garden, and nothing comes, because the poem that actually wants writing is about your brother, and you are not ready to be in a room with it. The unconscious will not fund decoy projects forever. Cure: write one page that begins, the poem I am avoiding is about, and see what your hand does. You do not have to finish that poem. You only have to stop pretending it is not there.
4. There is an audience in the room
The poet who emailed me in January was this one. Her fifth entry had scored lower than her fourth, and without noticing, she had started drafting for the scorecard: five imagined judges leaning over her shoulder at line one. Nobody can write like that. The score report is a revision tool, brilliant after the draft and poisonous during it. Cure: separate the rooms. Drafts are private, nobody ever sees them, and only finished poems apply for jobs. She wrote again in March to say the poems had come back the week she stopped drafting for us.
5. It is not a writing problem at all
New baby. Double shifts. A parent declining. Fresh grief. Some seasons of a life do not have poems in them, and calling that writer's block adds shame to exhaustion. The cure is to lower the bar to something a depleted person can clear: one noticed image, one sentence, most days. That is not a diminished practice. That is a seed bank. The poems will spend it later, with interest.
6. The block is finishing, not starting
Quietest and sneakiest. This poet has eleven drafts at ninety percent. Finishing means judging, and judging means the poem might be found wanting, so the drafts stay safely unfinished forever and the poet reports feeling blocked. Cure: an external deadline with stakes small enough to survive. A monthly contest window closing on the 25th has cured more of these cases than any book on process I could name; pick the strongest draft, call it done, and let it leave the house.
A Worked Example: What Cause 1 Looks Like on the Page
Because cause one is the most common, here is what obeying the bad-draft quota actually produces. A poet stuck for weeks on an opening line about her grandmother's kitchen let herself write the forbidden bad version:
My grandmother's kitchen was warm and full of love
and I remember it every single day.
Dreadful, and liberating. With the veto suspended, the hand kept moving, and four lines later this arrived:
Her kitchen kept its own weather.
Steam on the window all winter,
and her thumb, testing the dough,
the only clock we answered to.
The good lines were behind the bad ones the entire time. The block was never a shortage of material. It was a border guard checking papers, and the bad draft is how you bribe him.
The Ten-Minute Diagnostic
Before you try any cure, sit with a coffee and answer these on paper, honestly, in order:
- When I imagine writing today, what exact feeling arrives first: boredom, dread, fog, or grief? Boredom points to cause 2, dread to causes 3 and 4, fog to cause 5.
- What have I read in the last thirty days? If the answer embarrasses you, start there.
- Is there a subject I flinch from when it surfaces? Name it in one sentence. You do not have to act on it yet.
- Who do I picture reading my drafts? If anyone at all appears, cause 4 is in play.
- What has my body been through this season? Answer like a kind doctor, not a coach.
- How many drafts do I have above eighty percent finished? More than five says the block lives at the finish line, not the starting line.
Most poets find two causes tangled together, usually one craft cause and one life cause. Treat the life cause first. Craft problems are patient; they will still be there when you have slept.
What Not to Do
- Do not wait for inspiration to return on its own. Inspiration is mostly a lagging indicator of input and rest. Fix those and it follows you home.
- Do not buy a fourth book about process. You are researching instead of diagnosing, which is itself a symptom, usually of cause 3.
- Do not force a daily quota onto cause 5. Discipline applied to exhaustion produces resentment, not poems.
- Do not announce the block. Identity is sticky. The poet who tells everyone she is blocked has given the fever a name tag and a job.
And one habit to adopt regardless of cause: keep a short list of questions other poets have asked before you, because almost nothing about a stalled practice is new. The answers poets have given to how to overcome writer's block across a few centuries are strikingly consistent: read more, rest honestly, tell the truth sooner.
The Alarm Is on Your Side
Here is the reframe I offer every poet who writes to me in the eight-months-blocked voice. A smoke alarm is annoying, but you would never fix it by removing the battery. The block is information. It is your practice telling you, at volume, that something upstream needs attention: your inputs, your fears, your standards, your season of life. Poets who learn to read the alarm stop having mysterious multi-month silences and start having short, legible pauses with names.
The poet from January is entering again, and her March entry was the best thing of hers I have read, precisely because it was written for no one. That is the pattern I have seen over and over from the judge's chair. Nobody writes their way out of a block by pushing harder against the same wall. They find the kink in the hose, they unkink it, and then the water was never gone.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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