How I overcome writers block

It's all in my head but...

I’ve found that while writing my thesis I tend to stop in the face of writer’s block and procrastinate an awful lot thereafter. This bothers me, as I am pushing onto my thesis review in only a few weeks, and I can’t seem to just sit down and do focused writing.

 As productive as hitting your head on a brick wall

In the past few days, however, I have found a way out of my writing “dead zone”, and I’ll share with you three thought-processes I’ve employed to drag my motivation kicking and screaming into a more productive place.

• Write a template for a paragraph

 I often find that I know what I want to say, but I don’t know the details. By writing a template up of a paragraph, sentence by sentence, I find that my writing takes on a more logical progression.

Then, when I have the details I need, I can literally “fill in the blanks”. An example template: It is common practice to….. However, this method is out-dated because it is more effective to……. Previous research in this area is scarce, due to ……………, however, ………… The present study examines the benefits of using a ……… approach, which will increase the………… of ………………..

• Train of thought

 If you can read a heap of relevant papers, take useful notes you keep handy, and know exactly what you want to say, good stuff. I am never in that position: I rarely find my notes, I always read off-topic, and until I get my thoughts down on a page, I have no idea what I want to write about. 

To kick-start myself to write, I just sit down and write whatever comes to my head. It’s easier to work with words on a page than to imagine how you will structure your sentences before you write. Which leads me to my next point:

• You don’t have to commit to the words on the page (and realise that what you write will be crap)

The train-of-thought has made words appear on your page. Well done! Then you read what you have just written and……… it is terrible. There is little logic, and most of it is repetitive. There are spelling and grammatical errors everywhere. 

That’s ok, because now you have words on the page, you can trim them down, use a thesaurus to make a few words sound fancy and then just add a few references! Done! At best, you may get a 200 word paragraph from a 1000 word burst of writing.

So writing is a creative process, get those creative juices flowing onto the page in front of you and you’ll probably surprise yourself.

I’ll also share some great blogs I follow that helps (and motivates) me with my academic writing: 

The Thesis Whisperer
The Three Month Thesis
GradHacker
To Do: Dissertation