Beating Writer’s Block and Pressing ‘Publish’: collections from a Medium Workshop

The Google Calendar alert pinged me fifteen minutes before 9:30AM:

“7 Great Ideas for Your Next Story: How to Beat Writer’s Block and…is in 15 minutes.” I kept working as the time ticked closer to 9:30. Then at 9:25, I took a self-allotted bathroom break, turned on my iPad, and entered the Zoom session. We were live.

Jolie A. Doggett, senior platform editor at Medium, led the unknown number of attendees through various activities to warm up our thinking caps and put our writing fingers to work. The following is a 7-part series of those activities, and I think you’d agree with me that there seems to be a certain theme running through each.

Exercise 1: One word

Word: “Clean”

• Laundry
• space
• dirty
• chore
• mop
• Mr. Clean
• bald

“What does it mean to be clean? Not in the physical sense of doing laundry or fixing your space, but feeling clean? In a sorrowful way that twelve years of Catholic education will tell you, cleanliness comes from guilt of what you’ve done and what you’ve thought — and if that’s the only way to be clean, then on a scale of dried up droplets on the hood of your car to the mud tracks under your shoes, how dirty am I?”

Exercise 2: Picture perfect

• life
• death
• the in-between
• fulfilled life
• slow
• calm
• in the moment

In-between of birth and death is a series of moments. What makes a fulfilled moment (read: life)? Who decides what fulfillment is and, if we’re the decision-makers, how do we get there without falling apart?

Exercise 3: Write about yourself

I’m here because I’m lost and a constant need for direction and validation has left a void in my self-worth. For twelve years, I basked in the glory of pseudo-amazingness, of intellectualism, that I’m not sure who I am without academia and a percentage score and a letter ranking to my name. I was a goldfish amongst the algae, so what do I have now without my parents posting another certificate on Facebook for their high school friends to see?

I have writing. It’s the thing that set me apart because I wasn’t a good writer to get the blue ribbon. The voice in my head would never shut up so my fingers kept going, non-stop. Writing gave me empathy, and in turn, would send me an abrupt message of relatability from a compelled stranger. So I write because I no longer feel confident in the actual voice I had (though I’m slowly getting back to it). I write because I bask in the praise and I chase the need to feel seen and feel worthy of myself. O this body. Of this mind. Of the love the people in my life throw at me and I don’t know any longer how to give it back the second after absorbing it. Because somewhere here, it’s really bleak, and cold, and cracked, and I could take anything that comes in this direction. I am here because I cannot be vulnerable anymore.

Unless someone tells me to.

Exercise 4: Conflicting thoughts

Quote: Everything happens for a reason.

That is what I tell myself after every rejection and every lack of response. Some version of me can’t bear the responsibility that I have failed, that I am not good enough. And it feels like a scapegoat to blame it on the universe, but it's an easier pill to swallow.

“It happened for a reason.”

But what is the reason? Because all I feel is stuck, and pain, and fatigue—inside and out. What’s meant to be next? And what will that joy look and feel like if I’m at all capable of knowing when it’s there? The universe can shoulder some responsibility for the shortcomings that pinches at my ego because if I take all of the blame, I’m not sure I’ll be “everything” anymore.

Exercise 5: Who’s the expert?

Bojack Horseman reflects the dying hope in all of us. His inherent mistake- after-mistake cycle is a harsh exaggeration of the life we live. Is hejustified? No. But is he true? Sure. Don’t we all attempt to return to our glory days whenever and wherever that may be? Whenever and wherever we felt the most seen? We just want to be understood. Season six’s “Free Churro” episode perfectly encapsulates this moment with the words “I see you/ICU.” When we feel seen—understood and a little less lonely than when we started—existing doesn’t hurt as much.

Exercise 6: Write a letter

Dear my Mind,

Why the fuck do you go in a billion directions at once? And go full stop when we’re sat at our computer and ready to go? What is stopping you now that never stopped you before? I know we’ll eventually do it, but if we did it, maybe we’d have gone to film school or studied something we love. Maybe we wouldn’t be wallowing in our self-pity that failure seems to be the only thing going for us and force-feeding us mainstream ideas of self-care and manifestation and there’s truth to it, I know, but I never learned patience. I’m still on Patience 101 and I’m procrastinating, like how I push back ‘writing time’ on my Google Calendar to eight weeks later. Which is why we’re here, right? Because we’ll do it. Eventually.

I just don’t understand why you freeze up like a deer in headlights or a snowflake on the ice (well, what do we know about the cold? We live in fucking Los Angeles). But it's all cold, like you when we’re about to make a decision that could change our life, our future. “Stop doing that” sounds funny when I say it because it has to do with freezing and that’s literally the damned thing I’m telling you not to do. But you know what I mean. You’re not that special and you’re very special. Either way, whatever they tell you, you just have to do it.

Love,

Ash.

Exercise 7: Finish a draft

I didn’t have a draft to finish here, mostly because my drafts were on my computer and I wanted to get off it for this exercise. But what I did realize is that it feels really good to do this again. And as I moved words from pages to screen, I added a bit here and there, so I guess that’s finishing something.

I appreciate Jolie and the Medium team for coming up with this workshop. It made me realize how much I miss writing about what I love and what I know.

I can’t wait to share this with my therapist.