Three ways to beat writer’s block
Like a lot of authors I caught the writer's block bug. This was due to a whole host of reasons, but mainly because life is hard and the world is burning.
2025 may not have been the publishing success I expected (sorry book 2, you’re a 2026 joint now!), but here are three things that helped me beat writer’s block and re-start my creative life.
1) Little and often
This is very boring advice, but boy does it work.
Some of the best advice I’ve had is “no zero word days.”
It may seem extreme, but they didn’t mean pump out 1-2k words everyday come hell or high water. Instead, it was just to get some words down, even if it’s just one or two.
This inspired me to cut down my writing goals from 600 to 500 to 200 words. Some days I just try to get 50 or 100 words, some days I do none (thank you horror flu of late 2025).
This number may shock people - especially in the age of a huge swathe of indie authors publishing at least 4 books a year - but I’ve found that lowering the threshold takes the pressure off and lets me get on with writing.
I am anxious wee bean and often the best thing I can do is to get out of my own head. This means doing rather than thinking, and it's easier to do something when you make it achievable (see point 3 below). I can bash out a couple of sentences on my phone before bed and have reached my goals.
It’s great and you know what, it often leads to more. Last night I just wanted to get 50 words down. A tiny sliver of progress in a book pie. Guess what happened? Yes, I wrote more. Over 200 more and I felt so fantastic that now I can’t wait to get some more words on the page today.
It’s better to write 20 words for 100 days than plan for 500 and only do it a couple of times.
That’s basically the same word count, I hear you cry.
True, but the consistent firing of ideas will help produce more. Habits are formed over weeks, and as humans we love routines and showing up everyday (or whatever regular schedule suits you) will help you build one.
2) A change will do you good
I downed tools on book 2 in my Islands of the Northern Sea series. The first draft is basically done, but I. Just. Couldn’t. Get. It. Over. The. Line. It was pushed back and pushed back, and eventually I had to admit to myself (and editor) that it wasn’t going to get done.
So, I parked the book.
It took me weeks to disentangle my thoughts from it and to not shame spiral every time I thought about it, and that’s when the blankness came. I barely read and did not write. It was awful and I felt like I'd failed before I even properly began. The only thing that saved my sanity was a throwaway novella that I cooked up one evening.
I decided to shift my focus to the smaller, easier book. It’s a high heat, why choose romance and with a prospective word count of around 40k, it’s significantly shorter than my usual books (I live in the 70k zone normally).
Writing a world that could be a bit shallower with less plotting was a breath of fresh air. It gave me the headspace to dive into a new setting and explore a one-shot world. My Islands of the Northern Sea series is made up of interconnected standalones, and while it’s great to craft a world and characters that overlap (and sprinkle in Easter Eggs), it can get pretty complex, pretty quickly. I will see if the advice to write a series out of the gate is a good one (mine is 4 books, plus a secondary one. I know, I know, but I love these characters and they keep giving me ideas to play with) but having a one and done book feels exciting and it’s filled my cup in ways I never thought possible.
3) Be a S.M.A.R.T.y pants
If there's one thing I’ve learned from the world of work, it’s to make any goal SMART.
Which is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timebound.
It means that your aims/goals/plans should fit within this remit and can be applied to any project - even books!
It’s boring, it’s corporate and it works.
I broke my goals down into smaller chunks that I knew I could achieve. I’m a star-chart-loving-pat-on-the-head-chasing type of person. Positive reinforcement could get me to the moon and back, but as mentioned above, I’m anxious. With that comes a whole boat load of negative selftalk and criticism. I am not my biggest cheerleader, and while therapy has helped, I still need to put mechanisms in place to keep me going.
This is where the SMART framework comes in.
I like to give myself long lead times and track everything I do. For me this is a spreadsheet with an end date, countdown and dynamic word counter. I put in my starting point of words and what number I finish on, and let the basic formulas do the rest. It is so gratifying to see the numbers change as I go.
I also pared back my intentions for the year. I’ve set intentions for the last few years - both writing and life - but I kept trying to outdo the year before in the name of progress and failing. This time I brought it back down to three goals. All of which can be achieved running at 60%. My life is busy enough that going full throttle in all parts only sets me up for failure, unhappiness, and shutdown. Here’s to the half-arsed life!
N.B. I was using a great online writing tool that had a lot of cool features like daily word counts, project word counts, project sharing etc., but you could only access this information by clicking into a project. Having this hidden from my ADHD brain meant that I never looked and didn’t get the dopamine hit of seeing progress. It also made me feel guilty to just open the docs. Now I’m back to basics with Google Docs (not perfect I know, but suits me for now) and updating things manually. In short, find what works for you and give yourself permission to change.