I sat down to start my entry this morning, and I couldn’t think of anything to write about.

So, I thought that it might be fitting to tell you about the first time I lost the ability to put pen to paper.

I was sitting in a gymnasium at the University of Toronto with about 300 strangers.

I had an English final that afternoon: three essays in two hours.

Common practice dictated that I skim the questions first.

I did that.

My eyes scanned to the right and to the left and then again to the right.

I looked around at the sea of heads buried in their answer booklets.  Ballpoint pens were vibrating at supersonic speed.

That was the moment that my 22-year old brain went blank.

Zero. Zilch. Bupkus.

I can still feel how blue with cold my hands had become.

My cheeks clenched.

I exhaled so many times that one of the students sitting beside me looked up from her booklet only to flash me an evil stink eye.

The heat rose up to meet my other set of cheeks.

I knew that this was not going to end well.

Overcoming the Paralysis

It is a story that I’m reminded of again and again when learners ask me how to beat writer’s block.

Their stories are even more painful than mine.

Writer’s block is a luxury that thousands of English-language learners can’t afford.

They have to pass proficiency exams quickly in order to move on with the life that they’ve envisioned for themselves in Canada.

Many adult learners have a spouse and children to support.

Of course, there are books that offer different techniques and strategies to overcome this psychological impasse.

Some authors suggest starting a stream-of-consciousness journal.  At least 30-minutes of writing every day is recommended. Other books suggest finding a distraction to “walk around” the blockage.

Some psychologists say that people who have more dopamine in the thalamus region of the brain don’t suffer from writer’s block.  Dopamine is the “feel good” chemical in the brain that controls consciousness and sleep.

Writers have been known to do the wackiest things to get their creative juices flowing: getting drunk, writing in the nude, hanging upside down, and inserting plugs into their ears.

I’m sure that if you’ve been searching for answers to writer’s block, you may have read about all of the ideas that I just mentioned.

As far as I can tell, though, the road to recovery starts when you realize that there is no quick fix.

There is no magic pill, no miraculous strategy, no sweet elixir that will cure this problem 100% of the time.

It’s more difficult to cure than a physical ailment.

I’m not a doctor, but it seems to me that writer’s block can be caused by so many different things in an individual’s life at different moments: (1) personal trauma; (2) feelings of helplessness and inequality; (3) fear of failure or being judged; (4) loss of identity; (5) deep-seated resentment for the new language that a person is forced to communicate in; (5) being brought up in an educational system that encouraged memorization and discouraged creativity; (6) perfectionism, (7) incompetence, (8) fatigue; (9) depression; (10) sleep deprivation; (11) immaturity; (12) not wanting to write; (13) a refusal to trust ourselves.

I’ve only mentioned the issues that I’ve become aware of, thanks to the experiences students have shared with me.

To escape from the grip of writer’s block, I had to find the answer to two questions:  what was the root cause of my impasse?  When I figured that out, I had to ask myself what I could do to cope with it?   

If there is a glimmer of hope in this situation it’s that the people who have experienced — and perhaps are still experiencing — writer’s block are in good company.

Writers like Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Sylvia Plath, Iris Murdoch, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Gustav Flaubert were crippled by the inability to write at various stages of their careers.

They wrote about their experiences, analyzed them, and even crafted their own ingenious ways to circumvent writer’s block.

I credit the words of one of these great minds for helping me understand the fears that held me hostage.

Shortly after the crushing moment in the gymnasium, a professor loaned me his copy of “John Steinbeck: A Life In Letters“.

I’m happy to say that my exam experience got better after that.

If you’re still searching for a solution to writer’s block, simply click here to download Steinbeck’s letter to his friend, Robert Wallsten.

Please feel free to share your experiences with writer’s block.  I’d be happy to read your thoughts.