What Do You Write When You Can’t Think of Anything To Write?

What do you write when you can’t think of anything to write? I mean, apart from nothing at all. Shut up, literalists.

… I’ll come in again.

What do you write when you can’t think of anything to write? And by “anything to write,” I don’t mean anything. If you’re thinking about writing at all, you have some words floating around in your brain. You can, presumably, fill a whole page with verbs you had to conjugate in school or the things you need from the grocery store or repetitions of the word “loquacious.”

The difficulty isn’t in crowding the page (or screen) with letters, any letters. If you’re agonizing about what to write, you don’t want to write any old thing. You want to write…

… an email organizing a meeting of your project teammates
… a letter to your friend whose last missive arrived, like, seriously, five months ago
— an essay whose incisive argument and lucid style will net you an A or at least make sure you don’t fail this course
… a way for your novel’s protagonist to escape from the insurmountable trouble in which someone (was it you? It was you.) placed her
… a blog entry

The feeling for any of these cases is the same. You slump in your chair. The fresh notebook or new Word document stretches out in front of you, beautiful and pristine, its cursor blinking in the distance like the opposite shore of a cold lake you must swim–

No, scratch that. Swam across the lake at the cottage last week. This is harder.

Okay, so it’s not like swimming a lake, but you’ll still get the same stubborn knot behind your ribcage as you do standing there in your swimsuit when the air is cold, and the water looks colder, and your limbs are already tired, and the only motivation your true inner voice can offer is, “I don’t wanna!”

But you hafta. Because maybe at the other side of the lake (you can convince yourself) is something super important, like your favourite fictional hero and the coolest actor on your favourite show drowning ve-eeeery slowly, and only you can save them. Except probably not as exciting as that, because Harry Potter and David Tennant won’t really die horrible soggy deaths  if you don’t write this, but you will probably be the only one who shows up to your meeting. Or your friend will wonder why you don’t like her anymore. And nobody publishes a collection of just the awesome scenes instead of a full novel.

So you sit. And you set a clock. Or bribe yourself with snacks. Or tell your husband/wife/brother/sister/friend/stranger on the Internet to make sure you actually put pen to paper/fingertips to keys.

And you write.

You write draft emails that are nothing but I HATE THIS STUPID PROJECT ALL OF YOU ARE JERKS in all caps in the middle of the window.
You actually do fill a page with nothing but “loquacious.”
You write “*** MC gets away here somehow*** and move on to the easy line edits of the next scene, because it’s really important to choose whether your next dialogue tag is “Luke said” or “said Luke.”
You write a list of the things you have to write this week and take extra care drawing the check-boxes to tick off later.

Surely after all that writing, you deserve a break. Sometimes time away from words helps them swarm back. Perhaps writer’s block is like over-fishing — give your phrases time to repopulate and cautiously swim back into the shallows. The best sentences are crafty as pike and take equal patience to lure from the depths.

Maybe it’s not just the words failing you. Maybe you can’t think of anything to write because you have nothing to write about. Do you really know what time you want that meeting to be? Or maybe you have too many things — research notes and previous email chains and spreadsheets — that haven’t yet settled enough to form patterns that make sense. Words can’t crystallize from chaos.

Or maybe you have all the words, but corralling them into order seems less appealing that waking up two hours before your regular alarm.

Either way, that TV series on Netflix still has three more unwatched episodes.

And when you can’t watch anymore, and all the dishes are done, and you actually managed to hem the living-room curtains?

Then you assess what you already have at least three times in case you’ve already managed to finish without noticing it.

You haven’t.

You begin to wish that the fairy tale about the elves who make shoes during the night for a poor cobbler were true, and that the elves were helping you, and also that you were a cobbler.

And then you write.

You write…

… “Hi everyone” and “See you on Monday,” and a clear first sentence that conveys the main point of the email, and each word is like stepping deeper into an unheated swimming pool.
… a long anecdote about something that actually happened to you last year, but by the time you realize you already told your friend about it, it’s handwritten and half a page and too late to turn back now.
… an outline and the bibliography.
… a scene in which your protagonist hems the living-room curtains.
… a title that you have no idea how to flesh out.

And when you’re in the middle of writing that, you stop for a moment to admire your progress, and suddenly the sentences you were reeling out with effort snap and roll back up so you need to pick out the ends and coax them back out again.

You read something, maybe. You read what you’ve written. You notice it’s late, and your head hurts, and you never manage to make sense when you’re tired anyway. You wonder if this is one of those times you’re asking too much of yourself. You try on the idea of leaving these words for Future You (that genius writer!), and, honestly, it fits like it was tailored.

And then you write some more.

You write…

… the time and date of the proposed meeting, and if it doesn’t work for everyone, then they can sort it out themselves.
… answers to direct questions posed in the last letter, which you dig out from the mountain of papers on your desk.
… a second paragraph elaborating on the point you aren’t sure actually supports the thesis you identified in your outline, but you’re into it, so you keep going and put “CITE ME” in place of all the references you will look up later.
… notes on the scene that ought to happen, really, including details of how you’ll need to revise the previous three chapters to make all of it actually make sense.
… this blog entry.

Because even when you can’t think of anything, you write.