How to overcome the blank page and never waste 30 minutes of your life staring at a blinking "I"-cursor again
Unlock your creativity and boost your writing speed by stopping to judge yourself
Hi friend,
Hope you’re having a nice start to your week.
I’m writing today’s edition from my IKEA desk in my mellow Swedish bedroom (not IKEA worthy, but still cozy), admittedly smelling like a Danish cheese after doing my workout, writing my text while I’m waiting for the sauna to heat.
Upon Werner’s request, this letter will be all about how to overcome the intimidating blank page.
Let’s dive in:
(In this text, I will use the terms “writers’ block” and “the blank page’s intimidation” interchangeably, even though I realise they are different - please have hindsight.)
The blank page scares you because you’re afraid to fail
I’m convinced that we fail to overcome the blank page out of fear of failure, which causes us overly judge our writing and keeps us from getting into flow.
At first, it might sound like a helpful mechanism for keeping our writing quality high.
But:
Psychology shows we are terrible at predicting anything but the short-term future.
And we are even worse at evaluating whether other people will like our writing or not.
In other words, giving in to the blank page kills your writing productivity AND your creativity.
Creativity precedes novelty.
So, if we don’t dare to try something new with our writing, how are we supposed to be creative?
Stop judging - start writing
Overcoming the blank page isn’t as hard as it often seems:
To overcome the blank page, acknowledge that the sentences that come up in your head aren’t objectively bad - your subjective mind is just irrationally criticising them.
With that awareness, set a timer on 45 minutes where you only can write - you’re forbidden to edit or delete words.
Allow yourself to write, which will feel uncomfortable at first, because you’re still judging yourself. But don’t give up - continue and put every thought of yours onto that page.
Eventually, you get into flow and your sentences improve.
After your timer is off, go over your text. You’re now allowed to delete all junk (finally).
When you write enough sentences, some will inevitably be good.
By going for quantity first, you can later increase the quality by cutting bad sentences.
But it’s easier to remove bad sentences than to write good new ones - so only start editing once you got more than enough RAW text to work with.
By the way: overcoming the blank page gets easier with every repetition.
Writer’s block probably won’t go away entirely
Writer’s block is not a bug, but a feature of being a writer.
Funnily, I experienced writers’ block writing this very newsletter about overcoming writers’ block.
I noticed a new phenomenon which I’ll call “mini-writer’s block”.
It’s when you finish a paragraph or sentence and don’t know what to write next.
I overcame it by just writing & not judging my text.
TL;DR
We are intimidated of the blank page because we are afraid of being judged by others, so we choose to be overly judging with ourselves.
If you experience writers’ block, stop judging yourself and start getting that text out - write for 45 minutes without editing.
When the timer’s out, cut the junk and work with the rest.
Overcoming the blank page gets easier with every repetition.
Debrief
Update: the Triple T newsletter is now called Writing to Wisdom, because I felt as if the previous format constrained my creativity.
Tweets & Threads can be great supplements for a thought, but not always.
As I use writing as a way to improve my thinking and develop myself, I first named the publication Writing Wisdom - but later realised that adding a “to” would make it more accurate.
I’ll send it every Monday morning at 7:00am CET.
Thank you for reading today’s edition.
If this wasn’t helpful to you, I appreciate your feedback, as always!
See you next Monday,
Nils
(If you want me to cover a specific topic - perhaps something you’ve been struggling with yourself as a writer or thinker, feel free to reply to this email with your idea.)