Column: Writer, unblocked

Fifteen years ago this week—on Wednesday, November 3, 2004—I defended my PhD. I had a postdoc position waiting for me overseas, and I was eager to graduate.

But in the days leading up to the event, time got away from me. I had so much more to do than I thought I would—finish writing my dissertation, typeset it to satisfy my university’s onerous formatting standards, print and distribute copies to all my examiners, go shopping for something resembling a suit so I could look like someone resembling a serious academic—that preparing the defense talk itself fell by the wayside. The night before my defense, I hadn’t yet finished composing my slides. I certainly hadn’t practiced presenting them.

So I settled in for a long night of getting things done. As the senior student in the group, I had claim to the sole private office in our lab area—everyone else shared the group office next door—and I’d made it my own. In addition to the usual comfortable clutter of textbooks, papers, and lab notes, I had the walls adorned with funny newspaper clippings (including a story from the campus paper about my adviser Laurie’s husband that had made it into print with several queries from the editors intact) and the bookshelves lined with used books I’d picked up for their funny titles (including From Caveman to Chemist , one of the few I remember that were worth reading). I’d have to clear them all out within a few weeks, but I wasn’t yet thinking about that.

One office fixture that both predated and outlasted me was an old black-and-white TV perched high on a shelf. A year or two before I joined the group, my soon-to-be labmates Brad and Dave had spotted it, left for trash outside another lab, and thought it was too good to pass up. It had lost its antenna, but they’d attached a spare piece of metal cable that, when propped up at just the right angle, was barely enough to receive a few local channels.

I didn’t usually have the TV on while I worked, but that night I did: Tuesday, November 2, 2004, was Election Day in the US. Even though I was about to leave the country for a while—or so I hoped—I was feeling uneasy. As I finished up my slides and started practicing portions of my talk, I stood face to face with news anchors delivering election returns in fuzzy black and white. As the evening wore on, my tone grew more insistent.

Reader, I graduated.

Miller’s Diary

Physics Today editor Johanna Miller reflects on the latest Search & Discovery section of the magazine, the editorial process, and life in general.

Thankfully, that kind of last-minute scrambling is rarely a part of my life anymore. I’ve written enough news stories for Physics Today that I can reliably estimate how long each one is going to take, so I know how many days before my deadline I need to stop researching and start writing.

Knowing that you need to start writing, however, is not the same thing as starting to write. Even as a moderately experienced writer, I still find blank pages slightly intimidating, and I still grapple with the temptation to find something—anything—else to do other than to start filling them with words. Because I know I’m not the only one in the world who feels that way, I thought I’d share some of the tricks I’ve collected over the years for getting past that initial writer’s block. Here they are:

• As humorist James Thurber said, “Don’t get it right, just get it written.” In context , I’m not sure he intended that aphorism to be good advice. But lately it seems to have been reclaimed as an anti-perfectionist rallying cry, and I like that interpretation. In a first draft, it doesn’t matter if you get some names and dates slightly wrong, or if you use the same subject and verb in six sentences in a row, or if you reach for a word and grab the wrong one. You can (and should) fix all those things later. But if you’re so hung up on the details of your subject matter and of language itself that you don’t write anything, then you don’t have anything to fix.
• Write first drafts out in longhand, on actual paper. I picked this habit up from Dave, my grad school labmate, and I’ve been using it ever since. The idea, I think, is that it reinforces that the first draft is impermanent and doesn’t have to be perfect. I know that seems counterintuitive—surely writing on paper with ink is more permanent than typing on a computer equipped with a delete key—but it works. I don’t know why.
• Blur the distinction between rough drafts and outlines. Some writers I know (and some English teachers I’ve had) are obsessive outliners who insist that the only way to write anything sensible is to map out all the ideas first. I don’t subscribe to that view (although to be fair, most of the pieces I write these days are short enough that I can hold all the ideas in my head at the same time). But I do find that a good way to trick myself into starting to write is by telling myself that I’m just writing a bullet-point list of ideas I want to mention. The first few bullet points might be only a few words (“defended PhD 15 years ago,” “too much to do,” “presentation wasn’t ready”). But by the fifth or sixth one, I’m invariably writing near-complete sentences and paragraphs, and before I know it, I have most of a draft. I still have to go back and rewrite the introduction, but that’s not a big deal.
• If at all possible, get away from electronic distractions. To be sure, that was a lot easier in 2004. I wrote most of my PhD dissertation on a porch swing on the quad. When it got too cold to sit there, I moved to a carrel in the library. But even today, it’s possible to escape from the always-connected world. I jotted down some of my first thoughts on climate connections and the history of geometry in a park overlooking a lake, with all my electronics at home. If your personal circumstances permit, you can be apart from your gadgets for a few hours. Really, it’s OK.

How about you? Even if you’re not a professional writer, you probably do some writing now and then: research papers, grant proposals, essays for school, memos, letters, emails, social media posts. Do you ever have trouble with writer’s block, and if so, do you have ways to overcome it? If my tricks don’t help some readers, maybe yours will.