Being stuck for words at work can get you in a spiral. You can feel like a fraud, like the only one who can’t do their job. And that makes it even harder to write.
Spare a thought for technical authors. Their whole job is to explain complex ideas helpfully, and they get blocked too. Nearly three quarters of tech authors often find it difficult to write (per a survey I conducted last year). Most have temporary blocks at least every few days.
But their answers to the rest of the survey showed some clever ways to keep writing, or just to think about “writer’s block” in a more productive way. Let’s take a few minutes to learn from these pros.
What does tech writing have in common with your writing?
Most readers of Do The Words are managers, team leads, or other co-ordinating figures. Your writing may be more to enable team and management decisions than to describe any particular technology. But tech writers also enable decisions, for example helping:
…a developer to figure out the best way to work with a number of API methods to achieve a particular goal.
…an engineer to plan for configuring and installing a large industrial assembly in a high-risk environment.
…an accountant with how to conduct an audit in accord with relevant regulations.
…and many other complex decisions.
So, more than giving instructions, tech writers need to get across detailed scenarios, relationships, and even narratives, to communicate effectively. And that can be hard!
What causes blocks for tech writers?
The survey showed that there were many causes, but the two biggest were:
The current area that you are writing about is new or unfamiliar (53% of respondents)
It is not easy to explain complex concepts so that users can understand and act on them (44% of respondents)
This says to me that blocks are more often about the ideas themselves than the mechanics of writing. As Mark Baker put it in a LinkedIn comment:
We have to distinguish composition from transcription. There are times when you wrestle with a thorny compositional issue and no transcription takes place. There are also times when you have nothing to say.
So composition is a more frequent cause of blocks than is transcription.
These top two causes were consistent across respondents who frequently became blocked (every month or more often) and those blocked less often (once or twice a year, very rarely or never). Yet for the latter group of “low-blockers”, other causes were far less common than they were for the “high-blockers”. In addition to the “compositional” factor, some high-blockers tended to get stuck also with the formal expectations for the content type.
Some of the high-blockers seemed to get stuck in their search for perfection. One wrote:
…it can be very paralyzing to get started particularly when you know it simply won’t be perfect.
This tallied with what I’d read in Mike Rose’s classic study, “Writer’s Block: the cognitive dimension”. He observed high-blockers getting stuck when focusing too early on the formal mechanics of writing, for example a writer for whom:
…the final stymieing touch… was her concentration on verbal surface – concentrating on the minutiae of surface even before a fundamental confusion about topic was resolved.
Rose noted that it wasn’t that high-blockers disliked writing; in fact some seemed to revel in playing with words before the underlying concepts were baked. He wrote that two of the research subjects:
…enjoy “monkeying around” with language or finding the “perfect word” but, in this case, to the detriment of their fluency.
This love of tweaking surface features showed up for a high-blocker in my survey too, an “editor at heart” who “would much rather whip the familiar into shape” than wrestle with unfamiliar subjects.
What helps to unblock writing?
Many tech authors just take a break (62% of respondents) or do some physical activity such as tidying or walking (48%). A respondent who “very rarely or never” experienced blocks described a productive process:
First read up everything I can and jot down a sequence of points. Then take break and let my subconscious mind sort stuff out. Then I return to writing and everything just pours out.
By the way, it seems that other respondents viewed this kind of need to take a break as a block in itself. Perhaps the biggest overall difference I picked up between the low-blockers and high-blockers was simply that the low-blockers embraced writing as a process with ups and downs.
Some high-blockers also recognized that process, but felt it to be frustrating. A writer who felt blocked every few days wrote:
Sometimes you just have to write something on the subject at hand even if it’s garbage that you end up not using or end up editing completely. Basically you just have to “get over the hump”. I’m a perfectionist and this is VERY painful for me. I believe a lot of the tech writers I know are also perfectionist types, as I see them going through the same struggles.
Other techniques were also popular:
Although only about a third of writers said they started in another medium, it’s something that tech writers value in general. In another poll I ran on this specifically, 74% of 377 respondents indicated that they at least occasionally “first write rough drafts of new content in another tool/medium”:
Moving to a different medium temporarily is acclaimed tech author Sarah Maddox’s “Top tip for breaking writer’s block”, so I’d say there’s something worth trying here!
Another blogger, Bart Leahy of “Heroic Tech Writing”, recommends freewriting as a way to unblock blocks, like almost one-third of the survey respondents. But only 15% of low-blockers took this approach, compared to 42% of high-blockers.
Could it be that low-blockers are just easier on themselves during drafting, and what a high-blocker might call “freewriting” is just a low-blocker’s normal drafting process?
Or could it be, as Mike Rose suggested, that freewriting may actually confuse more than it elaborates?
Some current invention strategies like brainstorming and freewriting encourage the student to generate material without constraint. Certainly there are times when such fecund creativity is helpful. But I suspect that the more prescribed a task is, the less effective such freewheeling strategies might be: the student generates a morass of ideas that can lead to more disorder than order, more confusing divergence than clarifying focus.
To understand blocks is to reduce their impact
What was clear from my research was that no one technique can rid us of writer’s block. What seems to help most is to just accept the iterative process of writing, with all its modest starts, false starts, temporary blocks, and gradual moves towards work we’re proud of. As one respondent wrote:
It’s part of the job; don’t let it frustrate you or question your talent as a writer. You got this!
This is more than just saying “writer’s block happens so accept it”. It is that the more we embrace the process, the less we seem to get blocked — or at least the less we get hung up about it.
Notes: limitations of the survey
Most likely the respondents were self-selecting, ie were more likely to take the survey if they did experience some writing blocks. However, the consistency of the top-reported reasons for blocks and methods to overcome blocks gave me some confidence that the trends should apply to a wider population to some degree.
It’s not at all clear if the differences between low-blockers and high-blockers were causal (ie does avoiding conscious free-writing help keep things productive, or do low-blockers just do less freewriting anyway (or even do it but not really be aware of it?)
I didn’t attempt any kind of statistical significance test on the results, and indeed more of the insights I felt I got were from the free-text comments that respondents wrote.
