Goodreads asked Antti Vanhanen:

How do you deal with writer’s block?

Antti Vanhanen It used to drive me mad. One moment, I was in the zone and text just flowed through me and onto the page. A few moments later, I lost the zone. Suddenly, writing became difficult and I would spend a ton of time simply starting a paragraph or combining two ideas.

At first, I thought it was a sign that it was some deeper wisdom telling me not to write in the moment. Or perhaps I needed to do some sort of morning routine or apply some other strategy to keep myself in the zone all the time.

It wasn't until I realized that the ebb and flow of ease and difficulty is the fundamental nature of creativity that the writer's block stopped being a problem. In everything that we do, our energy is constantly ebbing and flowing and it has a tremendous impact on our ability to perform and our experience of the situation.

When I saw that getting stuck is part of the game of writing, it no longer seemed so important to try to get myself unstuck. I could relax into the "stuckness" and keep plugging away, knowing that it would sort itself out soon enough.

There is no writer's block - there's just the ebb and flow of energy that creates our experience. Surrender to it, and let your words flow through you.

flag