Why writer's block is one of your best creative tools

Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

Writer's block… It’s almost cliche how often it’s been written and spoken about in the creative ecosphere over the years. How to ‘tackle it’ is a question I get a lot as someone who publishes daily(ish) and has for several years now. Some prolific people are outspoken about how they’ve been unaffected by it. It’s just not a thing, they say.

Well, I don’t know about that... I think we all bump up against writer’s block at some point or another. It’s part of our design. As individually packaged and labeled humans, when it comes to creativity, we each want to make a thing — our own thing. A unique contribution to the world, individually authored and penned by us. Something we as individuals get credit for.

And so we close our eyes and hold our breaths and try to make something out of… nothing.

When we create from that place, that’s when it happens — we bump up against reality. We run head-first into writer's block. Because nothing worthwhile or remarkable is created from within our small, rotting, insignificant selves. As hard as the ego tries to work out of an isolated shell (which, unfortunately, is our go-to default setting as far as creative functioning goes), it will always fail. Because it has nothing to offer besides survival-based functions. And so, writer’s block emerges, not as a curse, but as a…