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Tips for students and/or early career folk who face a mental block in writing papers?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

I was just talking to a student of mine who’s considering grad school in philosophy. They love philosophy and they are good at it, in the sense of understanding well what’s going on, coming up with good objections/ideas, etc. But they find that when it comes to writing papers, especially big papers for classes or a senior thesis, they hit a mental block because so much of their own self-worth is tied up with the quality of the outcome. It’s almost as if they’re so afraid it’ll end up badly that they become anxious to even start doing the work.

Obviously that’s not going to lead to a productive academic career going forward. So my question is whether anyone reading this faced a similar obstacle early in their career, and if so how did you overcome it?

Good question–I suspect quite a few people struggle with this.

Do readers have any helpful tips?

Posted in

14 responses to “Tips for students and/or early career folk who face a mental block in writing papers?”

  1. Anonymous

    I have also suffered with a lot of mental blocks with writing, largely to do with actually finishing papers. The way that I tend to get around it is by almost intentionally writing a bad, or very rough, first draft. I find that it’s a lot easier to get a paper done once there’s a lot of writing on the page, no matter the quality. I think this could help here, because it’s less difficult to start if you don’t commit to hitting it out of the park on the first go.

    Reply
    1. Anne Lamott wannabe

      Seconding this, with enthusiasm.

      Related: https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf

      Reply
      1. Daniel

        This is also the advice of a writer for The Simpsons (via this interview: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/john-swartzwelder-sage-of-the-simpsons):

        “I do have a trick that makes things easier for me. Since writing is very hard and rewriting is comparatively easy and rather fun, I always write my scripts all the way through as fast as I can, the first day, if possible, putting in crap jokes and pattern dialogue – ‘Homer, I don’t want you to do that.’ ‘Then I won’t do it.’ Then the next day, when I get up, the script’s been written. It’s lousy, but it’s a script. The hard part is done. It’s like a crappy little elf has snuck into my office and badly done all my work for me, and then left with a tip of his crappy hat. All I have to do from that point on is fix it. So I’ve taken a very hard job, writing, and turned it into an easy one, rewriting, overnight. I advise all writers to do their scripts and other writing this way. And be sure to send me a small royalty every time you do it.”

      2. Marcus

        I do it as well—I call it “throw up, then cleanup”

  2. Anonymous

    There are many sources of this breed of anxiety.

    One of them might be that you don’t feel like you’re smart enough / well-read enough to offer legitimate objections to long-standing philosophical theories or arguments. And I certainly felt this, too. At one point in my career, though, I stopped thinking in terms of objections and started thinking in terms of confusions. Something along the lines of “I’m confused about how this philosopher got from this point to this point in their argument. Because I would have thought that X, but the author says Y.” Then, writing out that confusion turns into a more full-fledged objection. This has the added bonus that the output tends to be more charitable.

    Another source of this anxiety is simply that you want your papers to be perfect. This one, unfortunately, has no good solution. For most graduate programs, you are simply trained out of this anxiety if you have to write papers for each class you take during coursework. You have 11 weeks for a quarter system (hello UC system) or 16 weeks for a semester, and you need to output great papers. There’s just no possible way for them to be perfect. So, you develop a self-chosen standard of “good enough” and begin to use that. I now use that standard for papers submitted to conferences and to colleagues for comments. For journal-readiness, you do want a standard of “perfect”, but the bar for perfect lowers the more you read other papers. (Now, for me, perfect means (1) a good (great?), clear, original argument, (2) total internal cohesion in the paper, and (3) a clear-eyed explanation of the set-up and the resolution of the argument / view. Often, the hardest part is (2).)

    Finally, there is a short hop from one’s self-worth being tied to the quality of one’s work and one’s self-worth being tied to the *results* of one’s work — grade, publication, awards, citations, etc. The latter is especially pernicious and to be intentionally guarded against.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    ohhhhh, I have thoughts! In fact, I have a whole blog post drafted up from like three years ago that I never sent because maybe it’s not that interesting, or the tone isn’t quite right, and/or it’s not good enough and anyone who reads it will think I’m dumb, or cringe, or…

    So yeah, not only do I have thoughts, I have experience. I used a combination of the following strategies. Some of these are more about publishing, but might help nonetheless:

    1. Find someone you think is smart and let them see the draft. If they think it’s good/good enough, then who are you to question them? After all, ex hypothesi, your ideas might not be very good, you might not be that smart, etc.
    2. Rethink the purpose of writing and especially of publishing. Your work is not a precious fledgling animal that can only be put out into the world with a full set of armor. It’s an idea that’s probably wrong. But guess what? Being error or objection-proof isn’t the goal. The goal is to get a conversation started, or to keep one going. You don’t need to be right to do that.
    3. Think of it as exposure therapy. Do the thing; maybe it’s wrong or it sucks; congratulations, you took a step towards overcoming the problem.
    4. Remind them that most published work is read by very people, if at all. (Sorry, it’s true.)
    5. Think of the most annoying person you know, whose work you think is bad, or just really boring. What’s a discussion in the literature you wish would just go away already? Okay, guess what: you have the power to do something about it. Take up space, because if you don’t, that horrible person/boring conversation will. (Look, I didn’t say these would all be virtuous strategies…)

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    Without intending to be discouraging, I remember several grad school colleagues who had a similar kind of block to writing. Some of them did well enough in the coursework phase, with professors who indulged late work. But I don’t remember any of them finishing their dissertations.

    I can think of a few strategies, though someone who has experienced this might have a better idea than me. One is to seek therapy, to help unblock this. As OP says, it is probably a kind of fear of failure or perfectionism. Disentangling self-worth from academic or job performance is a good idea anyway. The second is to establish a daily writing habit. 30 or 60 minutes of writing every day (a journal, blog, or whatever) can make writing second nature and perhaps then assigned writing tasks won’t seem so high stakes.

    I have noticed myself that usually when I fell like I don’t have anything to write, I just need to read something and then in no time at all I find myself taking notes, developing ideas, etc. So, maybe read more to write more?

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I’m a big fan of the timer method mentioned by this comment. I admittedly haven’t suffered from writers block in the sense described here, but I used to have a problem with procrastination, or not starting large projects because they felt overwhelming. To get through writing my dissertation I would set a timer daily for a relatively short amount of time, and the rule was that I had to work on that document and only that document until the timer went off. Short daily periods of work add up to a full paper length draft surprisingly quickly. I use this method still if I want to finish something within a certain deadline but don’t feel enthusiastic about starting it.

      Two other mindsets have been useful to me. The first is to differentiate writing for content, editing for style, and mechanical work like adding references. A first draft is going to be largely rewritten anyway, so there’s no point spending a lot of time early on making sentences perfect; spend more time drafting the content. Further though, mechanical work does count as working on the paper and it’s something you can do if you are feeling stuck on a substantive argumentative point.

      The second is to always write with the mindset that “this can and might be deleted later.” I don’t recommend writing a paper without a general outline of what you will accomplish. However I often will simply try writing out a brief point to see how it works in the overall argument. Sometimes these more experimental points get deleted. Sometimes entire blocks of text get deleted or reshuffled in later smoothing out the paper’s organization. Having this in mind I think helps with the feeling that you might not yet feel confident with each paragraph you are drafting. (This mindset is also vital for coauthoring, incidentally – you need to be okay with your coauthor potentially deleting whole paragraphs you drafted! I’d say that my experience coauthoring with a more senior person has given me a lot of further insight into the writing process, although unfortunately doing this as a grad student is usually inadvisable.)

      Reply
  5. Luke

    I’ve struggled with writer’s block for years. There are different causes of the block on different days, but a common one is (similar to your student) anxiety that the product will suck, and I will be exposed as a dummy. It helps to remind myself of the easy-to-forget truth that writing papers isn’t a smart person contest. In writing papers, we’re trying to be helpful, informative, clear, and so on. Anyone can do that, with enough time and effort.

    Aside from attitude management, here are three concrete strategies I used to overcome writer’s block while my writing my dissertation:

    (1)
    Write a casual dialogue, with one character being you, and another a friend whose voice you know pretty well. Once you have a few pages written, you can easily rework everything into essay form, and because it’s dialogic, it often flows quite well.

    (2)
    Instead of writing a paper, create a PowerPoint presentation, with images and all. Imagine that you will give this presentation to your friends, or your family. Assume they know nothing about philosophy, so you must explain every little term, move, theory, etc. I find talking about philosophy so much easier than writing about it. But if you can give a detailed talk/presentation, you can write a paper.

    (3)
    Write all important terms, arguments, authors, objections, etc. that one can think of on a bunch of 3×5 notecards, lay them out on the floor, and organize them into a narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end. There’s something about the hands-on nature of this exercise that gets me out of my head.

    P.S. My advice is to make a concerted, sustained effort to solve this anxiety problem ASAP. It will never go away on its own. Explore radical, creative solutions, until you find something that works.

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    Maybe this seems counterintuitive, but one big change for me happened during the part of grad school where I started reading more published work outside of classes. I realized that the standards of the discipline were a lot lower than I had thought, given that I had up until that point been reading stuff assigned for classes or seminars, which are mostly classics, or stuff suggested to me by more experienced people, which tended to be really good, or stuff written by faculty at my department, which also tended to be really good. That cast the misleading impression that the typical philosophy paper was beyond anything I could hope to write, certainly as a grad student and probably ever. I felt it hard to justify writing something that didn’t rise to that level, and since I couldn’t rise to that level, why write? But then I started reading other stuff, and realized it’s way worse than the selective sample I had been exposed to. Not that published stuff is bad! — it’s hard to write something good enough to get published, as we all know. It’s just that, it’s way more achievable than I had thought, and that was more or less immediately clear as soon as I moved on from the amazing stuff to the representative stuff. And, frankly, while most published stuff is at least good, some of it actually is quite mediocre. It’s weirdly reassuring to read that stuff, and I might suggest for others that (like me) struggle with confidence to seek it out every now and then. Not as a way to make you feel like you’re better than the author, but just as a way to remind yourself the stakes are not actually that high.

    Reply
  7. Anonymous

    I agree with the above comment that one should try to solve (improve upon) this problem ASAP, if one is serious about graduate school in philosophy (or becoming a professional philosopher). Two books that night help: Robert Boice’s book, Professors as Writers: a Self help guide to productive writing, and also Paul Silvia’s book, How to Write a Lot. Both have lots of good advice about how to overcome writers block, etc. and develop good writing habits.

    Reply
  8. Charles Pigden

    On the whole writer’s block has not been a major problem for me, which isn’t to say that I haven’t had problems writing some of my papers. But when I was young, like many another, I used to suffer from impostor syndrome which sometimes had a paralysing effect. I used to lie face-down on my bed in despair, wondering whether I had any talent for philosophy. Since imposter syndrome is sometimes a source of writer’s block, perhaps it is with explaining how I dealt with the problem. My solution was similar to that of one of the Anonymi but it is not quite the same. I fixed on a philosopher who was simultaneously a big cheese in the discipline but also, in my opinion, a complete idiot. I then focused on the thought that however dumb I was, I couldn’t possibly be dumber than X , and that X dumb as he was, had managed to make it big in philosophy. If an idiot like X could do it, so could I. This little litany restored my self-confidence and enabled me to get down to business. It might work for some other people.

    (In case people are wondering , for me, the idiotic X was Norman Malcolm. His star ha since faded, but at that time – in the early eighties – he was still quite famous and influential, despite Putnam’s devastating critique in ‘Dreaming and Depth Grammar’. )

    There is another kind of writer’s block problem from which I have occasionally suffered. I have had the ideas but they are a bit inchoate: the arguments refuse to gel and the prose refuses to flow. What has sometimes worked for me is disciplining my thoughts by endeavouring to express them in blank verse, for which (owing to some weird kink in my brain) it turns out that I have a knack. I have three publications in which I do this, one of which (in my opinion) is one of my best. Now obviously this isn’t going to work for everyone but it may be that trying for some kind of pastiche may help you to overcome this kind of writer’s block. By providing the necessary stylistic discipline, it becomes paradoxically, more easy to write. I have a piece in which I try to channel David Hume (though I think I end up sounding more like Edward Gibbon) and an unpublished paper in which I endeavour to imitate the sing-song style of Aquinas’s Summa Theologica.

    Article N: Whether Z

    It would seem that not Z
    Objection 1, Not Z because W
    Objection 2, Not Z because V
    I reply that [basic argument for Z]
    Reply to Objection 1: Argument W fails because …
    Reply to Objection 2: Argument V fails because …
    Therefore Z.

    I once read an article in Teaching Philosophy in which the author claimed that allowing people to adopt another ‘voice’ (‘The Separation of Powers and President Trump: From the desk of John Locke’) had a liberating effect on often not-very-well educated and unconfident undergraduates. A similar strategy might work for philosophy graduate students. You could write in your own persona but in somebody else’s style or you adopt somebody else’s persona. It might not result in publications (I got lucky) but it might liberate you to write interesting and amusing term papers. And, as with the dialogue option suggested in an earlier post, once you have written your pastiche it is relatively easy to turn into something more prosaic.

    Reply
  9. Anonymous

    I am not sure how one is to overcome this issue, but, like others note, the student must seek help in addressing this. Going to graduate school with such an issue is bound to lead to serious difficulties and disappointment. And it seems almost irresponsible to recommend that the student consider graduate school, given the prospects of getting a job. As one commentator noted, I too met a number of fellow graduate students struggling with this and very few finished their PhD.
    I do know some employed philosophers who struggle with writing, and for the most part they are not happy people. The job is NOT fun if writing is really difficult for you.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I second this.

      The cause of the issue is not primarily the tied self worth, but lack of confidence in producing expected outcome. You can gradually build up confidence and become one of the success stories above, but you may also not make a lot of progress. Either is quite possible, and we should not just look at the success stories. If you end up not having enough confidence, this job is not going to be fun, *even if* it temporarily works out. (I, for example, consider quitting my fabulous job.)

      Reply

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