How I Killed Writer's Block

As in my post, "How to Pull an All-Nighter," the important topic headings - The Writing Center and The Digital Recorder - are boldfaced for scanning.

I have always had terrible problems/anxiety writing papers. I have always HATED writing assignments because of it. No amount of boldface, italics, or increases in font size can possibly stress my feelings in the previous sentence enough. I was constantly putting off papers because of that awful dread.

Oh, sure - occasionally, I will have bursts of insight that I can type about for eons on end - but that typically isn't the norm. During an official IQ test I took in 2nd grade (part of the process for my diagnosis), the psychologist asked me to write something or other. Well...I didn't. Instead, I crawled under the table and cried about it for about ten minutes. That incident is far closer to my normal reaction to paper assignments. I have even neglected to write my assignments for a number of classes! Knowing all this, it's pretty ironic that I'm writing a blog... ;)

Two of my final semester's tools worked amazingly well together to reduce my writer's block, though; my college's writing center combined with my digital recorder.

There's a list of suggestions my sister found and passed on to me at the time (I will dig it out and edit it into this post later) that made a lot of sense - some of which I was already doing. Combining them made written assignments a breeze compared to the horrible struggles I went through before. My main problem was that I always had trouble getting my countless ideas from my head to the page. This list played a part in overcoming that.

Basically, what they suggested was to find someone you could talk to for 10-20 minutes about your paper immediately before typing; essentially, to get your mind into a state of thinking about the problem and generating ideas. With the right person asking leading questions, you could essentially verbalize an entire paper in well under an hour!

The Writing Center's role

I had been essentially doing this for years through my college's Writing Center, which was chock full of tutors who were trained to help you at any stage of your paper...from brainstorming, to structuring the paper, down to copy editing. I typically used them for brainstorming and some structure. It was GREAT! I found that I always generated tons of ideas while verbally talking about them! I never really needed structure or copy editing because I found that my papers typically flowed VERY smoothly once I was on a roll. My only snag was in brainstorming - alleviated by talking to a tutor trained to draw out my ideas.

...the problem was, by the time I got to the keyboard - even with notes from the session, written by the tutor - everything I had discussed with them was gone. Another irony with me - I don't remember jack squat orally, but when *I* write it down it's typically burned into my head...at least exactly what I wrote is. This is where the digital recorder played its key role.

The digital recorder's role

The digital recorder functioned as my memory of the session. It allowed me to - on demand - play back my conversation with the tutor. This meant that every idea that came to me out of discussion was preserved! I would simply carry my recorder with me when I went to type, and play back the entire conversation while typing.

The brilliant thing about my own digital recorder, the Olympus DM-10, is that during a recording you can set up to 16 'index marks' to skip to that particular point. Think of index marks as 'tracks' on a CD. It's amazing. I'd just hit the 'set index point' button on the recorder during the conversation (or class) and I could EASILY find that point again by clicking the fast forward/rewind button during playback. I used this to mark topic changes during my writing center sessions, which allowed me to play back ideas as often as I needed to while typing. Basically, this allowed me to relive the idea generation process that occured live.

If you have a digital recorder that doesn't have this function, bring some form of stopwatch instead(cell phones typically have one), synchronize the stopwatch with the start of the recording, and just write down the stopwatch time the topic of conversation switched.

This made my last semester SO much more bearable - and allowed me to function in a class that had 10 papers due as assignments, and without relying extensively on extensions! I NEVER would have done so well before combining those ideas. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to leave them!

A quick word on lengthening papers

I was looking through some Facebook groups earlier when I came across (and joined) one called Writing Papers Single Spaced First Makes My Double Spaced Result Climactic. Now, I've done that before, and it's a GREAT feeling to watch your material double in length. I've also done my share of BSing papers before...but not even close to the sophistication of the group members. Holy cow. When I'm strapped for time - and more importantly ideas - I will rely *heavily* on quotes. They're fantastic for making points.

In addition, it's possible to base a paper around quotes. Cheating/plagarism isn't necessary - in fact, citations can take up a HUGE chunk of space. When I was strapped for time once, I simply found a few good quotes that answered the questions the assignment was asking, and just started typing as much as I could think of that was related to the quote. It can really help eliminate writer's block. Granted, the particular paper I'm thinking of didn't get finished - but I still handed it in for partial credit.

But these students? Genius. I've played with the document settings before - occasionally 'adjusting' (read:widening) the margins. I never really did much with fonts, but toward the end of my college years I started to see a lot of my teachers start to specify the font and size to use for the papers. There were many...other things that gave me a good laugh, things that never occured to me. Some of my favorite wordplay suggestions (out of a very long and impressive list) included using long synonyms, and also using the passive voice for sentences.

I didn't get very far in the lists, but it's definitely worth looking at those message boards. Their ideas were BRILLIANT, and I can in no way take credit for their ideas. If you have any other ideas you didn't see (between this post and their message boards), leave comments! :) I would be willing to share - privately - the more...clever tricks I saw. I don't know if I would personally be comfortable using ALL of the tricks that were mentioned, but I'm not you - and I'm not the one writing your paper. Use whatever you found useful (or necessary), and good luck in your paper writing! As I discover more, I will update the blog. Good luck!