9.9 hOW DO yOU BEAT WriTEr’S BlOCk? Ever sat down to write something, and nothing came up? If you haven’t, it means that you don’t write much (or you have some magical power that no one else has). Every writer I’ve ever talked to or worked with (including myself) has dealt with writer’s block. In fact, some of the greatest writers of all time—Ralph Ellison, Harper Lee—battled with it for decades, and had it crush their careers (neither wrote a book other than their first). After decades of writing books professionally, and working with thousands of authors to help them through these issues, I have developed an approach to writer’s block that is different than most, and—if applied correctly—almost always works. WHAT IS WRITER’S BLOCK? The term “writer’s block” was created in the ’50s by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler, in a paper called “Does Writer’s Block Exist?” Bergler was from the Freudian school of psychoanalysis hOW DO yOU BEAT WriTEr’S BlOCk? · 431