Have you ever wondered how to overcome writer’s block? There’s a specific kind of dread that hits when you open your document, stare at the last sentence you wrote three days ago, and feel absolutely nothing. No ideas. No momentum. No desire to be there at all. If you’ve felt that, you don’t need me to explain what writer’s block is. You need someone to help you figure out why it’s happening and what to do about it. That’s what this post is for — a real look at how to overcome writers block, broken into the two layers where it actually lives: the emotional and the practical.

I’ve dealt with both, sometimes at the same time. And the thing I’ve learned is that they require completely different responses. Treating an emotional block with a plot outline won’t help. Trying to journal your way out of a structural problem won’t either. So let’s separate them out and deal with each one honestly.

Part One: The Emotional Block

This is the one nobody wants to talk about, and it’s the one that causes the most damage. Because emotional blocks don’t look like blocks. They look like procrastination, or perfectionism, or suddenly being very interested in reorganizing your desk. They disguise themselves as practical problems — “I just need to figure out the plot first” — when the real issue is something deeper that has nothing to do with the plot at all.

Ask Yourself the Hard Questions First

Before you try any technique or trick, sit with this for a minute. Be honest. Which of these sounds familiar?

“I’m afraid it’s going to be bad.” This is the big one. The fear that what you write won’t live up to the version in your head. That you’ll put in months of work and end up with something mediocre. I’ve been here more times than I can count, and it’s paralysing because the only way to find out if it’s going to be good is to write it — which is the exact thing the fear won’t let you do.

“I’ve put too much pressure on this.” Maybe you’ve told people about the book. Maybe you’ve set a deadline. Maybe you’ve built it up in your mind as the thing that’s going to change your career or prove you’re a real writer. That kind of pressure turns every writing session into a performance, and performance anxiety kills creativity fast.

“I don’t think I’m good enough.” Imposter syndrome. You’ve read authors you admire and you can’t imagine your work belonging on the same shelf. So you stall, because not finishing means never having to face the comparison.

“I’ve lost the spark.” You were excited about this project once. Now it feels like a chore. You’re not sure if the idea was ever as good as you thought it was, and pushing forward feels pointless.

“I don’t actually want to write right now, but I feel like I should.” Sometimes the block is your brain telling you it needs rest. Not every pause is a crisis. But it’s hard to tell the difference between genuine burnout and avoidance, and that uncertainty keeps you stuck.

If any of that resonated, you’re not broken and you’re not lazy. You’re experiencing something that virtually every writer goes through. The question is what to do with it.

Lower the Stakes — Write for Fun

This is my single best piece of advice for emotional blocks, and I mean it completely: stop writing your book for a while and write something with zero stakes.

Write fan fiction. Write a weird short story you’ll never show anyone. Write a letter to a fictional character. Write a scene from your book but from the villain’s cat’s perspective. It doesn’t matter what it is. The point is to reconnect with the part of writing that’s play — the part that got you into this in the first place, before it became tangled up with ambition and fear and self-judgment.

When I hit a wall on a ghostwriting project a couple of years ago, I spent a week writing silly flash fiction — 300-word stories about completely absurd scenarios. None of it was good. All of it was fun. And by the end of the week, the dread had loosened enough that I could sit down with the real project again without my chest tightening.

You’re not wasting time when you do this. You’re reminding your brain that writing can feel good. That’s not a small thing when the block is rooted in fear or pressure.

Separate Your Identity From the Book

This is harder, but it matters. If you’ve fused your sense of self-worth with whether this book succeeds — whether it gets published, whether people like it, whether it proves something about you — then every writing session becomes an existential test. No wonder you’re blocked.

Try to hold the book at arm’s length. It’s a project. It’s a thing you’re making. It is not you. A bad draft doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. An unfinished manuscript doesn’t mean you’re a failure. I know that’s easy to say and hard to feel, but even just naming the pattern — “I’m treating this book like it determines my worth, and that’s not true” — can take some of the weight off.

Talk to Someone Who Gets It

Writer friends, writing groups, a therapist who understands creative work — any of these can help you untangle the emotional knot. Sometimes you just need someone to say “yeah, I felt that too, and I got through it” to break the isolation that makes the block feel permanent.

I avoided talking about my blocks for years because I thought admitting I was stuck meant admitting I wasn’t cut out for this. Turns out, every writer I respected was dealing with the same thing. The ones who kept going weren’t the ones who never got blocked. They were the ones who asked for help when they did.

Part Two: The Practical Block

Sometimes the block isn’t emotional at all. Sometimes you genuinely don’t know what happens next, or the scene you’re trying to write isn’t working, or the whole structure of your book has a problem you can sense but can’t identify. These are craft problems, and they need craft solutions.

If You’re Stuck on a Specific Scene, Skip It

This sounds like cheating. It’s not. If one chapter or scene is stopping your entire momentum, leave a placeholder — I usually write something like [FIGURE THIS OUT LATER — she needs to get from the argument to the train station] — and move on to the next part you do know how to write.

I use this constantly in ghostwriting because deadlines don’t care about my creative struggles. And here’s what usually happens: by the time I come back to the problem scene, I’ve written enough of what comes after it that the solution is obvious. The block wasn’t a lack of creativity — it was a lack of context. I needed to see where the story was going before I could figure out how to get there.

If You’re Stuck on the Whole Book, the Problem Might Be Structural

This is a different beast. If nothing feels right and every direction you try fizzles out, there might be a foundational issue — a plot that doesn’t hold together, a protagonist without a clear want, a conflict that’s not strong enough to sustain a full manuscript.

When this happens, stop drafting and go back to the bones. Pull out whatever outlining method works for you — the three-act structure, the Save the Cat beat sheet, the Story Grid, even just a simple list of “what happens and why” for each chapter. Map out what you have and look for the gaps.

Common structural problems that cause blocks:

• Your protagonist doesn’t have enough at stake. If nothing terrible happens when they fail, there’s no urgency — for them or for you.
• The middle has no engine. Acts one and three are usually easier because they have natural momentum (setup and climax). The middle needs its own source of escalating tension, and if it doesn’t have one, you’ll stall out somewhere around chapter eight.
• You’ve written yourself into a corner. A plot decision earlier in the book has made the next steps impossible or uninteresting. The fix might mean going back and revising what you’ve already written — which is painful but sometimes necessary.
• The character arc and the plot arc aren’t connected. If the external events of the story aren’t challenging your character internally, the whole thing feels aimless, even if stuff is technically happening.

If you can identify the structural problem, the block usually resolves itself — because now you’re not staring at a vague wall, you’re solving a specific puzzle.

Get Outside Feedback

When you’re too close to see the problem, someone else often spots it immediately. Share what you have with a trusted beta reader, a critique partner, or a developmental editor and tell them where you got stuck. You don’t need them to fix it for you. You need a fresh pair of eyes to say “I think the reason this isn’t working is because your main character has no reason to go to that house in chapter five” — and suddenly the fog lifts.

I resisted outside feedback for a long time because it felt like admitting defeat. Now I see it as one of the most efficient ways to get unstuck. Someone else’s perspective can save you weeks of spinning your wheels alone.

Use Writing Prompts to Loosen Up

Creative writing prompts aren’t just for beginners. When you’re practically stuck — you know you need to write but you can’t find the entry point — prompts can work like a warm-up before exercise. They get the words moving without the pressure of it needing to be part of your manuscript.

A few approaches I’ve found useful:

• Write a scene from your book that will never appear in the final version. A flashback to your character’s childhood. An argument between two side characters. A diary entry from your antagonist. It doesn’t need to be canon — it just needs to get you thinking inside the story again.
• Use a random prompt generator and give yourself twenty minutes. There are dozens of free ones online. The constraint of a random topic and a time limit takes the decision-making out of it, which is half the battle when you’re stuck.
• Rewrite a scene from a book you love, in your own style. Not to plagiarise — just as an exercise. It’s like a musician playing someone else’s song to warm up their fingers. It reconnects you with what good storytelling feels like from the inside.

Change Your Environment or Routine

This one’s simple but I’m always surprised by how well it works. If you always write at your desk, go to a coffee shop. If you always type, try handwriting for a session. If you write in the morning, try writing at night. Sometimes the block is partly habitual — your brain has associated a specific setting and routine with the feeling of being stuck, and shaking that up can reset the pattern.

I wrote three chapters of a stalled project in a pub once. Not because alcohol is a creativity tool — I was drinking tea — but because being somewhere unfamiliar made the writing feel new again. The novelty tricked my brain into engaging instead of shutting down.

The Block Isn’t Permanent — Even When It Feels Like It

Here’s the thing about learning how to overcome writers block: there’s no single fix that works every time, because the block is different every time. Sometimes it’s fear. Sometimes it’s a broken plot. Sometimes it’s exhaustion. Sometimes it’s all three stacked on top of each other.

But it does pass. Every time. I’ve been writing professionally for years, and I’ve been blocked more often than I’d like to admit. I’ve stared at blank screens, scrapped entire drafts, and convinced myself I’d used up whatever ability I once had. And every single time, I eventually found my way back — usually by doing one of the things in this post.

If you’re stuck right now, here’s the short version: figure out whether the block is emotional or practical. If it’s emotional, lower the pressure and write something just for fun until the fear settles. If it’s practical, zoom out and look for the structural problem, or get someone else to look at it with you. And if it’s both — which it often is — start with the emotional side first, because you can’t solve a craft problem when your nervous system is convinced the whole thing is a referendum on your worth as a person.

You’ll get through it. You always have before, even if you don’t remember that right now.