# If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying

![rw-book-cover](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1200,c_limit,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F171b3526-4aee-42c7-a1ea-81d6c8257942_593x740.jpeg)

## Metadata
- Author: [[Sasha Chapin]]
- Full Title: If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/if-you-have-writers-block-maybe-you

## Highlights
- Perhaps you’ve complained before that you don’t have anything to write about. That your “mind has gone blank,” that you don’t have any ideas. I don’t believe you. I know that you have mental contents, right? Your mind is constantly moving. You’re always producing judgments, attitudes, opinions, emotions, melancholy, malaise, anger, and so on. You have things to write about. What you do is just put the things in your head on the page, in basically the order they naturally occur. Flip over the rock in your mind, type about the beetles.
    - Tags: [[writing]] 
- The remedy is simple, although it does involve a short, sharp shock of frankness with oneself. Stop lying about who you are, and write the things that are actually inside you. If, deep down, you want to write about misunderstood teen gymnasts with pet magic lions, your literary fiction about sad suburbanites will not easily come out of you, and it will probably not come off well.
- Or, to put it another way, it should feel like work rather than labor. This criterion was proposed by art critic Dave Hickey, who, after writing about and working among many of the great visual artists of our time, said in an interview, of creative work, “I think that if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it … I mean it’s work, but it’s not labor.” Intuitively, we understand this distinction well. Labor is breaking rocks with a pick-ax while someone holds a gun to your head. Labor is your tenth hour in the warehouse when your vertebrae are starting to feel crunchy. Work can be challenging, surprising, effortful, emotional, but it isn’t something that requires intense coercion, although may require a little coercion, sometimes, in the form of a deadline or a structured work environment of some kind. Most tellingly, it feels rewarding, in a deeper way than the “thank fuck that’s over” swell of relief you feel at the end of a day of laboring. It feels like you did something on earth.
- Inevitably, if you’re honest, you find out that you’re not exactly who you aspire to be. There is some distance between you and your exemplars. Maybe it’s a short distance, or maybe you’re way off to the side. Maybe you thought you were a clear-eyed rational pragmatist, and you discover that you’re a rover with the soul of a poet. Or perhaps the opposite. That can be painful. But it’s ultimately easier to take this pain than persist in a false, lonely place, conducting a masquerade that, even if it fools others, can’t fool you. If you can’t even be frank about who you are in a room alone, I find it hard to believe that you can do it with the people in your life.
    - Tags: [[writing]]