Writer's block has actually been studied, which is more than can be said for most writing advice. The findings are unflattering to the folk remedies and genuinely useful.
The short version: short daily sessions, whether or not you feel like it, and more than one technique at once.
Single Techniques Do Not Hold
Robert Boice tested the four standard treatments for writing blocks against each other across an academic year. His 1992 conclusion:
"Four traditional formats of treatment for writing blocks (automaticity, regimen, self-control, and social skills training) proved insufficient to maintain unblocking in professorial writers for periods of an academic year. A combined application of the four historically prominent interventions was clearly more effective in terms of stable productivity, manuscripts finished and submitted, and manuscripts accepted for publication."
Two things follow. Every single intervention failed to hold over a year. Only the combination worked.
And the line that indicts the entire genre of advice this page belongs to:
"Because writing blocks are too often conceptualized and treated by way of lore, a theory of blocking is proposed that clarifies the fundamental steps in effecting lasting unblocking."
Treated by way of lore. That is the state of most of what you will read about writer's block, including the confident lists of five tricks that will unblock you.
Waiting for Inspiration Makes It Worse
The most direct test. Boice split published faculty into three groups: one contracted to write daily under a financial penalty for missing, one merely encouraged to write, one asked to defer writing entirely.
"The results indicated that the contingency group produced a clearly higher level of written pages per day than did either of the other groups... Contingency management of writing productivity also facilitated rather than impeded the appearance of creative ideas for writing."
The group compelled to write daily produced more pages and had more ideas. The design specifically tested whether forcing regularity would damage creativity, and found the opposite.
His later work found the same in reverse. Comparing binge writers with people writing in brief daily sessions, the binge writers "accomplished far less writing overall", "got fewer editorial acceptances", "scored higher on the Beck Depression Inventory", and "listed fewer creative ideas for writing."
So the romantic model, waiting until the pressure builds and then writing in a long inspired burst, was measured against the boring model and lost on every count including creativity.
Blocked Writers Misjudge Their Own Time
An uncomfortable finding worth knowing before you diagnose yourself. Boice's 1989 study questioned two assumptions about procrastinators:
"that they are reliable reporters of how they spend workweeks, and that they are not easily observed in the act of procrastinating"
Both assumptions failed. And the intervention that worked was unglamorous:
"The second inquiry tested an intervention for procrastination (helping new faculty find brief, daily sessions in which to write) that proved effective and relatively unaversive."
He names the two components of the problem as "bingeing and busyness". Busyness is the one people miss: being genuinely occupied is how not-writing sustains itself without feeling like avoidance.
What This Suggests
Drawn from the findings rather than from lore:
Write on a schedule, not on a feeling. The compelled group outperformed the encouraged group, which outperformed the deferring group.
Keep sessions short. Brief daily sessions was the intervention that worked and was "relatively unaversive", meaning people could keep it up.
Use several approaches together. No single technique held for a year.
Track what you actually do. Since blocked writers are not reliable reporters of their own time, a record beats an impression.
Treat busyness as a symptom. Being too busy to write is part of the pattern, not an external obstacle to it.
Do not wait to feel ready. Regularity produced more ideas, not fewer.
The Caveat
Every one of these studies used academic writers, not novelists. The subjects were faculty writing papers, not people writing fiction. Applying it to a novel is a reasonable inference and not a demonstrated result, and anyone telling you the research proves something about novelists specifically is overreaching.
There is also a real distinction between blocked-as-in-avoidance and blocked-as-in-the-book-has-a-problem. This research addresses the first. If you cannot write chapter nine because chapter nine does not work, that is a structural problem, and the remedy is revision rather than discipline.
What Deckle Does
The daily goal and streak are the schedule mechanism. Given that the research favours regularity over volume, a target small enough to hit daily is doing more work than an ambitious one.
Writing time is tracked separately from word count, in active minutes as you type. Since blocked writers are unreliable reporters of their own time, having the actual number is more useful than it sounds, and it distinguishes a day of not writing from a day of writing badly.
The writing trends view shows the pattern over weeks. The shape Boice measured as productive is a run of modest days; the shape he measured as counterproductive is long gaps punctuated by binges.
Focus mode addresses the busyness half, which is covered in how to write distraction free.
For the target itself, see how many words should I write a day.
Common Mistakes
- Looking for the one technique. All four standard treatments failed alone over a year.
- Waiting for inspiration. The group made to write daily had more ideas, not fewer.
- Bingeing to make up for lost days. Measured as less writing, fewer acceptances, worse mood.
- Trusting your sense of where the time went. The research questions exactly that.
- Treating busyness as an external obstacle. It is named as a component of the problem.
- Applying discipline to a structural problem. If the book is broken, fix the book.
FAQ
Q: Is writer's block real? A: Real enough to have peer-reviewed treatment studies. What is not supported is the idea that one trick resolves it.
Q: Should I write even when it feels bad? A: The evidence says regularity beats waiting, on output and on idea generation.
Q: How long should sessions be? A: Brief and daily was the effective intervention, described as "relatively unaversive".
Q: Was this studied on novelists? A: No. Academic writers. Generalising to fiction is an inference.
Q: What if I am blocked on one specific chapter? A: That is more likely a structural problem than a psychological one, and revision is the tool.