I have been struggling the past month or so with working through writer’s block. When I was younger, I thought writer’s block was just an excuse people gave themselves for being lazy, but over the past few years, I have had several instances of writer’s block that have taken months and months of productive writing time away from me. Like any naive young person, I had to experience the thing first-hand before I acknowledged it as something legitimate that writers, as well as other creative types, have to deal with.

When you are deep in the chasm of writer’s block, it can make you ask the question of whether or not your time of being a writer is up. Will I ever write again? Should I toss aside this novel and do something else in my life? Was I even supposed to be a writer in the first place? And all the while the entity that has your creativity in a strangle hold is whispering “yes…yes!” over and over again.

The thing that we all must realize as creative types is that this is just part of what we do. There are ways to avoid it or at least prolong the inevitable, and knowing what causes us to go into a writer’s block can help with that. Unfortunately, that is not something I can fully go into here because it’s different for everyone, but I think knowing how to get out of writer’s block is more useful because that is when we’re desperate to get back to work or thinking about throwing in the towel altogether.

My first suggestion is what I make my creative writing students do at the beginning of every class: Pull up a blank word doc (or pull out a blank sheet of paper for my hand-writers) and write for a specific amount of time. If they want a writing prompt or some words to incorporate into a story, I give them those, but for the most part, they all just write what is on their minds. It could be brainstorming for a story, a scene they have already written but want to change to a different POV, what happened to them that day, how they can’t think of what to say and how frustrating that is for them, or whatever else strikes their fancy as long as they write. This almost always gets the gears turning for my students, but for me, it has just left me with dozen of word docs with a paragraph about how I have nothing to say.

For people more like me, my next suggestion is to go for a walk and clear your mind or think through things that seem to only pop when you try to write, but even take it one step further. We live in a world where we are constantly bombarded with information and content that we rarely have time to think for ourselves. My suggestion to people with writer’s block is to spend less time on their phones and watching TV, at least until you’re past your block. Imagine it this way, you have absolutely no time to think through things that are going on in your life while also having information shoved into your brain at all hours of the day, and then you sit down at the computer demanding your brain to think creatively when all it wants to do is process that weird conversation you had with your coworker the other day or remind you of all the things you’ve been putting off to binge that new Netflix show.

My last suggestion is less about getting out of it and more about how to make the most of your time when you’re in the pit of despair called writer’s block: read some books. While this may inspire you to sit down at your desk and try to create a story like the one you’re reading, it’s also a great opportunity to use what would have been considered lost time to get a few more books under your reading belt. Reading is so important for everyone, but especially for writers. You can attend a dozen writing classes, but if you’ve only read a handful of books in your life, you are never going to know how to apply the techniques learned in those classes. Whether you have writer’s block or not, whether you even write or not, I think everyone should be reading every chance they get.

So in sort, give yourself a time-frame (or word count, if time-frames stress you out) and try to write as much as you can without thinking beyond the page your on, go for a walk and clear you mind in the short term, and in the long term spend less time watching TV and scrolling through nonsense on your phone, and read as often as you can. These are not instant cures and no one but yourself can pull you out of the suffocating state of writer’s block, but they are good practices to have anyway and will make you a better writer overall.

Hang in there. Despite what your brain is whispering to you, you are meant to be a writer, if that’s what you want to be. And know that this sort of thing is just part of being an artist, so don’t let it get you down.