Author: Angela Rydell

Writer’s block can feel personal—as if your writing is giving you the cold shoulder, because you deserve it, you bad writer you. Sound silly? Good. Because you don’t have to take a block so seriously. Sometimes taking it too seriously is part of the problem.

So call it what it is: a block in your thinking. That’s all it is. It may be a fear, a resistance—one that’s been there for a while or popped up yesterday. Either way, that block is a mindset barrier that can be cleared. Use these three steps to work through it:

• First, identify what’s in the way.
• Second, lower your standards.
• Third, dredge a channel for your craft.

Identify, lower, dredge. These three steps to channel-clearing mimic the literal act of dredging a waterway, so the flow can go back to normal—or even better than normal—and everything can move freely again.

Here’s a good visualization you can use to get a feel for it: Imagine you’re a dredge-boat captain. You set your craft upon stagnant waters, identify what’s in the way, then go low. Yes, you’re scraping the muck where the bottom feeders lie. That’s how you remove silt and sediment and break the block.

And as you dredge and scrape away, grabbing the gunk, whatever and wherever it is, accepting it for what it is, the flow increases. The channel may even expand and widen.

Then, as you feel that flow moving again, you no longer need to collect the muck. Your priorities shift again.

In that increased flow, find new depths.

Go from freeing the channel from gunk and shallow waters, to deepening the waterway.

Hemingway might say that on your way to those depths, you’re working for what he calls that “one true sentence.” Or it may be one word, then one true phrase, leading to a sentence that brings you to your story’s (or poem’s) true source–and the form it needs to take on the page.

That probably sounds familiar. Even intuitive. Though I’m setting out a step-by-step pattern, I’m not revealing anything new—all I’m doing is bringing your attention to what you already know, and already do.

This is you, shoring up your thoughts, going with that familiar feeling of sorting through the bad material and finding good material, moving through thoughts that slosh about as you write, and again, zeroing in on the good stuff, and this flow of movement.

A part of you knows, in the tips of your fingers on the keyboard, in the synapses of your brain: I’ve been here before. And I know how to test the waters to find that one true word, phrase, or sentence, and use it to go deeper, get to the true source, and clarify my concept. And I can do it again.

The blocks just trick you into thinking you can’t do it again. They may have different names, and come in different shapes and sizes, but they’re blocks just the same.

Just keep working through it, as you’ve done before. Every time you hit a block, follow this pattern of thinking, this process, and you clear a channel for your craft.

Restart, and adjust the flow of your thinking: identify, lower, dredge—then the deepening.