When Nothing Comes Out

What Hemingway and Joy Williams had to say about writer's block, and how you can overcome it.

Photo by Pedro Araújo.

“I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say. If I started to write elaborately, or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written. Up in that room I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about. I was trying to do this all the time and it was good and severe discipline.”

An excerpt from Ernest Hemingway’s memoir “A Moveable Feast”

There are more days when I sit down at my laptop, open a Word document, and have nothing to say than days when I make significant progress on any story or idea.

On these bad days, my fingers tend to alternate between hovering over the keyboard and tapping lightly at the keys (but not hard enough to actually write anything). It feels like there’s a timer ticking in my head, counting down until a baby is awake or some other unavoidable task needs to be done.

There’s this one story I’ve been working on for about six months now. It starts with the description of a photo I took in 2008, on a disposable Kodak camera, of my best friends walking down a rocky valley on an island in Scotland. It’s been more than 10 years since we all lived in the same city. The story is about that reality: how, as we get older, distance drives a wedge into our closest friendships and relationships. Just last week, I rewrote the introduction to the story seven times, using different words and approaches. I wrote 1,200 words then cut them down to 400. Now I’m back at two lines.

In the fall, I had sent the photo to an artist friend in Arkansas, who created a beautiful collage version of it. That collaboration was supposed to be the kick-in-the-trousers I needed to finish. Instead, I’ve dawdled and tinkered, nowhere close to done.

It’s a problem that many people who create for a living struggle with, whether they’re designers, woodworkers, knitters, knifemakers, or watercolor painters.

When I struggle with writer’s block, I find comfort in Ernest Hemingway’s words, from his memoir about his time spent in Paris in the 1920s. Start with a single sentence. I pick something I know, or that I can say without hesitation. I focus on getting words down. If they need cutting or revising, I do that later. The important thing is building the discipline I need to master the craft by getting my reps in, like I would if I were practicing to become a great tennis player¹ or violinist.

The more I read about the lives of great writers and artists, the more I realize they all struggle (or have struggled) with exactly the same things many of us do. There are few, if any, geniuses who on their first attempt create their magnum opus.² In the fall, I was writing on a rainy Sunday afternoon in the library at the University of Tennessee, where I work, when I walked by a collection of manuscripts of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books. Inside were pages and pages of edits made by Fitzgerald and his editor (the great Maxwell Perkins, who also edited Hemingway). It looked like the first draft of one of my stories after I get it back from an editor. For a long time, it made me furious or ashamed to see the rows of track changes and red ink. I took it as a sign that I’m a bad writer, and that I probably chose the wrong profession. But the deeper I dug into my craft, the more I realized that everyone has an editor, and our work is better for it.³

So maybe there’s two lessons I take from this. One is to just write anything, even if you hate it while you’re doing it. The second is inspired by a response the writer Joy Williams gave Literary Hub last September after she was asked about writer’s block.

“Perhaps more should have it. Perhaps the disease, the dilemma, the affliction is trying to tell the writer something: much that is being produced is unnecessary, indulgent.”

There are situations when we all need to know how to write: cover letters and resumes, speeches, dating profiles, college admissions essays, love letters and obituaries for our loved ones. But for the writer who is sharing their work publicly, like me, there’s this question of whether that work needs to exist. I think of it like Twitter. How many times have you hesitated on the tweet button after writing something up in anger at the results of an election or a football game? I’ve published and deleted posts on every social account I keep⁴.

Maybe the hesitancy or the inability to get the words out is a sign that those words don’t need to go out into the world?

If you’ve determined the work does need to go out into the world, this is what I do to combat writer’s block: I take a detour through old work and other non-writing tasks that still have an impact on the quality and reach of my writing.

Here are a few examples:

• When I decided to move my work to Substack, I went through everything that I’ve published online, sorted through it, and made decisions about what to include. I cut down the stack to only the work I’m proudest of.

• I go to old stories that I’ve already published, and I make revisions and updates (I did this just the other day with one of my favorites, “Can My 9-Month Old American Daughter Love Everton?”). A coworker who read a breakdown I posted online of how I wrote my profile of NCAA champion swimmer Maddy Banic recommended me to give a PechaKucha presentation at a university conference last August, so I adapted the work I had already done for that format.

• I pull quotes from stories and poems and create Canva designs for social media.

• I tinker endlessly with the titles of sections/newsletters. I write and rewrite my bio. I update my email signature (give Wisestamp a try if you want something personalized that also looks good).

• I send emails or texts asking people I admire (other successful entrepreneurs, writers, and creatives) to have lunch or meet with me on Zoom so I can learn from them about their approaches to work, building their careers, and see if there’s any potential for collaboration.

In other words, writing—or creating your main work, if you’re not a writer—isn’t the only thing you can do to move your art/craft/business forward. That’s not to mention the benefit of just closing your laptop, picking up a book, and sitting on the porch with a cup of coffee to just read for a while.

How do you deal with writer’s block? I want to learn from you and share that with others who ask me about this ever-present challenge in our creative work.

1. Just go and watch King Richard to see how much work Venus and Serena Williams were expected to put in before they became world-famous tennis players. Richard, their father, even pulled Venus from the juniors circuit, to the confusion and fury of her coaches and others around the family, for three years so she could focus on school and continue training until her pro debut—at 14.

2. Take, for example, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, probably the world’s most famous painting. According to historians, Da Vinci began sketching it around 1503. It was discovered in his studio 16 years later, after his death. He did not live to see even a glimmer of the impact the painting would make on the art world.

3. I also like to have a first reader. My editors will often see fragments of my work before I turn in a draft, just to make sure I’m on the right track. But, for a lot of stories, I like to have my wife, who is not a writer, read them. She represents the audience, who may be less impressed with a fancy word choice or a long sentence than another writer would. She’s pointed out fundamental flaws or confusing word choices before and has saved me some embarrassment.

4. I don’t want to veer too far in another direction here. But, I tell my journalism students this: if what you have to say has already been said. If you have nothing new to add to the conversation. Then stop, and go write something else. I know this from experience. I spent too many years as a blogger writing stories that already existed in droves online, except mine were worse because I was doing more compiling than any kind of original writing. But I’ll talk more about this topic another time