The one thing that helps writers write

A breakthrough! What we learned from surveying 600 writers about their writing blocks, habits and happiness.

Back in 2017 I was interviewing an academic for a piece I’d been commissioned to write for a publisher. At the end of our chat I casually asked him how his own writing was going. A simple enough question you might think, but it really hit a nerve. After a long pause and with a crack in his voice, he eventually said this:

“The problem is that writing can drop down your priority list – weeks go by and you haven’t touched your project. When you lose the rhythm it’s very difficult to get going again. It’s also a mid-life thing. You lose confidence – you can lose your nerve. You’re sitting there writing and you’re thinking ‘why the hell would anyone want to read this? This isn’t important – this isn’t interesting’.”

At the time, his words surprised me. Not because I hadn’t encountered anyone with the same kind of problem before, but because of who my interviewee was. This guy was a law professor with 25-years’ experience. A deputy dean of a highly prestigious British university and an advisor to the UK government, he had written numerous books and had over 200 papers to his name.

The puzzle of writing blocks

Why was he blocked? I wondered. Perhaps if he was younger or just starting out? He had everything he needed to write: time, resources, flexibility, an audience – he even had a publisher ready and waiting. It just didn’t make sense.

But of course, humans rarely do make sense. What I didn’t realise at the time was that people can get blocked (and unblocked) at any age and at any life stage. Just because someone has success, ample time and all privileges in the world doesn’t mean they actually write. In fact, it often has the reverse effect. 

The following year we teamed up with researchers at two American universities to undertake a study. In the research, we surveyed¹ 600 academic authors from around the world – although the findings can be applied to any type of writer. We wanted to learn more about how they got their writing done and whether we could identify patterns. Patterns like:

• When writers procrastinated, did they procrastinate in the same way?

• Did the writers who produced a lot of work use any specific method or tactic?

• How did people find time for writing – was there a ‘best’ approach?

• How did the calm and collected writers stay that way? What was it they did (or didn’t do) that made the difference?

So what did we learn? While some tactics worked better than others for different writers, we didn’t find one approach that worked for all. There was no ‘ideal’ amount of time to write for. Writing daily worked for some people but not others. But we did find one pivotal thing that applied to everyone.

Not one thing but many

We spotted that the writers who were the most productive and fulfilled, who were least stressed out and better able to cope with the pressures of writing, had all built a system of support structures around themselves. Each system was highly personal and suited their lives at that very moment.

Some were simple, some were complex. Some changed all the time, some stayed the same. The one thing that helped these people was to use the combination of approaches that worked for them at that point in their lives.

At the time, we expected to find that writers who were older or who had more experience would be more resilient and adept at battling their blocks - but that wasn’t the case at all. We talked to scholars with decades of writing experience who were blocked, miserable and unproductive. Many of these writers had been stuck for years and some - like our professor - were on the verge of breaking point.

On the flip side, we spoke to inexperienced academics at the early stages of their careers who were highly productive and happy. They’d figured out what kept them motivated. It didn’t matter to them that they hadn’t been writing for long – they tended to ignore the well-meant writing advice of their supervisors and wrote in a way that suited them.

Our breakthrough

Launched at the London Book Fair in 2019, our research went on to be cited in scholarly articles, quoted in blogs from organisations such as The London School of Economics and featured in publications like Nature² and the Guardian³. Today, our findings feature on university syllabuses.

We discovered that the writers who said they had found specific structures and systems that helped them write were:

• By far the most productive: They were the most likely to have written and published the highest number of articles and papers.

• Better at coping with pressure: 40 percent of authors in this group said they feel under no pressure to write whatsoever.

• More satisfied and fulfilled: 61 per cent said they were highly satisfied with their writing process.

• Less likely to experience blocks and barriers: In fact, they experienced very few.

Unfortunately, we also found that the writers who said they didn’t know what tactics worked for them or who’d never given it much thought had a tougher time. They were far more likely to be unhappy, burned-out and anxious. They were also more likely to experience harmful emotional blocks like procrastination, perfectionism, guilt and low confidence - barriers that can affect mental health and quality of life.

The findings of our study went on to be at the heart of our book Written. At its core, our work and our advice is based around one simple idea:

How you get the writing done is personal to you and the only way you find out your unique system is to notice how you write and take a more mindful, experimental approach to what works and what doesn’t.

We believe that this is the most powerful thing you can do to gain a happier, healthier and more productive relationship with your writing.

From insight to action

In our study, the writers who changed their behaviour and built support structures around themselves did so only because they’d noticed what it was that helped and hindered them – and took action as a result.

The writers who wrote in a mindless way – on autopilot – were never able to change because they never paid much attention to their writing. They kept doing the same things again and again – things that didn’t work. This made them unhappy and unproductive.

As much as we’d love to give you a simple formula to transform your relationship to writing overnight there isn’t one. There are no rules, no linear process that suits everyone, no sure-fire solution that’s guaranteed to work for all.

But there is a way to build a better relationship with writing if you take a more intentional approach, noticing what works and what doesn’t and changing along the way. That way you’ll find a process that actually works for you.

Thanks for reading, keep writing

Chris and Bec

1. The best summary of the research can be found here on the LSE’s Impact blog – there are also links to the research paper if you want a proper geek out. 

2. Kwok, Roberta, ‘You can get that paper, thesis or grant written – with a little help’, Nature, 30 March 2020.

3. Burkeman, Oliver, ‘Is a daily routine all it’s cracked up to be?’, Guardian, 19 April 2019.