Struggling with Writer’s Block

I think I’ve finally managed to identify what I’ve been feeling for many many months now – and particularly in recent weeks – and that is… writer's block. As we continue to work on our final pieces, I find myself feeling frozen, frustrated and unable to put pen to paper. I want to write, but writer's block can be debilitating especially when you’re in the very early stages of a new play as I am now. I want to be figuring out my characters, developing the story, honing down what the themes of the piece are, but instead am struggling to work on what I’ve already written at all.

Writer's block is such an overwhelming, frustrating and disheartening thing. I have moments of inspiration and motivation and I’ll write down some ideas, some chunks of dialogue, and have a real sense of what I want to write and where I want it to go…and then all of that vanishes as quickly as it came. When this happens the whole writing process feels harder and further away than it did before. I want to try and hold on to these moments of inspiration and motivation and work on not giving up again as soon as the writer's block kicks back in. I might try and do this by sitting down, setting a timer for only a few minutes, and forcing myself to write something. Be it a short monologue or a conversation between my characters even if I know it’s not very good and I’ll never use it. Or – and this is something I’m learning on this process – I’m going to remind myself that writing doesn’t necessarily have to be dialogue and scene work, and a good thing to do when I’ve got writer's block is to forget about the actual writing and work on some planning or research instead. I could fill in character profiles, research the themes of my play, do a plan for a scene rather than diving straight in and trying to write it from scratch, or I could do some unrelated reading of plays or theatre blogs and podcasts to try and kickstart some inspiration. Turning the feeling of being blocked into space to do some thinking and writing in other shapes and forms.

This all ties back into two of my biggest writing goals for 2022. They are – not giving up when it gets hard, and also just generally being easier on myself if I’m struggling to write.

Eilidh Nurse

Eilidh is part of the Bunbury Banter Young Playwrights Programme 2020-2021