If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying

Perhaps you’ve complained before that you don’t have anything to write about. That your “mind has gone blank,” that you don’t have any ideas. I don’t believe you. I know that you have mental contents, right? Your mind is constantly moving. You’re always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You have things to write about. What you do is just put the things in your head on the page, in basically the order they naturally occur. Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles. If you don’t want to do that, it’s because you’re not comfortable with the notion that these are the things that you actually think. You would prefer to have more sophisticated opinions, or, maybe, more reasonable opinions. For example, let’s say you want to write about the risks posed by artificial intelligence. That seems like what all the respectable people are doing these days. But, to your horror, you can’t bring yourself to tell the world that you th

Perhaps you’ve complained before that you don’t have anything to write about. That your “mind has gone blank,” that you don’t have any ideas. I don’t believe you. I know that you have mental contents, right? Your mind is constantly moving. You’re always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You have things to write about. What you do is just put the things in your head on the page, in basically the order they naturally occur. Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles. If you don’t want to do that, it’s because you’re not comfor