Purely writing usually isn't that hard. Writing what you want you want to say can be much harder, and conveying these things effectively doubly so.

Anyone can play guitar too. Making music is harder. Making music express your feelings harder still.

For me not really, it's just matter of spending more time on it.

If I spend 20 minutes, I will just produce BS. If I invest more time and energy, something good will come out.

When I was a kid I always assumed everybody was the same: you could always express what you had in mind. Took me years to realize not only it's not the case, but most people actually don't use words for their meaning at all.

Once I got that, my oral communication improved tremendously, but writing stayed mostly the same. Oral can be messy, sometimes it's even better than way. On paper, though, being clear is a virtue.

And if you can't be clear from the beginning, just babble until your brain gets in the flow, and you'll get to something eventually. Then strip the useless part, clean up the good one, and you got a winner.

I understand how others can suffer from writer's block even though it does not pertain to me. Have not happened and never will. Typically those who suffer writer's block go into writing on the false premise that all writing should be inspired. Like the first sentence you type on a blank page should be heavenly divine. There is this false notion in our society of a true, mythic writer that is a muse-inspired drunkard puking paragraphs reeking of genius. If that's how you think about writing then, of course, writer's block will be common.

When I write, the premise is I attempt to turn shit to gold, eventually.

Closer to the truth is as described in this article, writing is more like blind plumbing work. It's very revisional. Whole paragraphs and pages are reworked and outright deleted left and right. The final script is rarely in the order you started. Then your editor goes to work, butchering your baby. It's very painful, but you know this is the way to end up with something the reader finds readable.

Reading a published novel as a wannabe author, you must keep in mind that it's revised to perfection. Repeatedly hammered like a Japanese sword. Writing is definitely a forging process and not magic.

> Reading a published novel as a wannabe author, you must keep in mind that it's revised to perfection

Yes, in fact, I'm so used to that I sometimes edit my HN comments 10 to 15 times, and get frustrated when the "edit" link disappears.

But the initial one is always easy to write. I don't wonder "geez, what could I say?". It also often sucks, full of typo, things that could be badly interpreted, and so on.

Funny thing is, I'm currently learning to let it suck. Invest less energy. And as this thread proves, I'm failing miserably at it :)

Writer's block doesn't mean you can't write random words, it means you can't write something in a way to properly continoue your work.

It's the same, the only difference is filtering and shaping, and keeping up at it. It's a cycle. Babble, filter, shape. Then babble again. Sometimes you skip directly to write well shaped words because you are in the zone. Sometimes you just embarrass yourself because you are in public, and there is no opportunity to shape and filter.

But the process is the same, at least for me.

I assume other people do it differently, but the point is, writer's blocks seems alien to me. As long as you are not in a coma, I don't see how your mind cannot come up with something. And as long as it can, something worth committing too can be found.

It's not like sport when you have an actual physical limitation. You brain is literally a machine to produce ideas. It does that constantly, in mass.

Everybody has it, because everybody have weird dreams when they sleep.

I sleep a lot. A LOT.

Haha, this thread is amazing to read! People who reply to your post try to explain why the writer's block is a thing, and inadvertently demonstrate the reason it is a thing for them and not for you.

They talk about how easy it is to write random words and how hard it is to write well, and you keep explaining that you're supposed to remove the filters, start by writing random words, and then edit until it's good.

I think that's the difference between the people who have writer's block and the people who don't. People without the writer's block are able to relax their filters, people who suffer from writer's block are trying to write well right away, and it's hard and painful.

Ha said that, even understanding your advice consciously, I still find it incredibly difficult to apply. Logically, I see that there's no reason to be ashamed of writing a bad draft, I don't feel like I'm afraid of being judged by people, or like I judge myself, I think that I want to be able to just babble until I stumble upon something good I can refine. But for some reason, my brain just refuses to do that.

Maybe it's difficult because my brain feels like "babbling" is a waste of time and energy, and I always give up before it gets good. Maybe because it's difficult to motivate myself to do things when I don't have a plan, don't feel like I have control over what's going on, don't have the guarantee that my efforts will pay off. Maybe it has something to do with status or confidence or insecurities that apply these filters whether or not I choose to. I dunno. I know that these reservations are silly, but I see why people struggle with it, I do too.

I think that relaxing the filters, letting go of control, and trusting in your brain's ability to generate random words and make them good later on is also a skill, and some people find it easier than others.

You just did it with this comment though. Now find how you did it and apply it somewhere else

But you're writing about a subject you know about - what about something new, something actually creative? Writing fiction? A subject you know nothing about and for which you can't look up anything?

Same. To get creativity, just removes filters, apply constraints, and let it flow. The mind is creative.

For quality, reapply filters.

For subject you know nothing about, either research, or just play with your ignorance.

Maybe you are extremely talented but don't realise it?

My father was like that, it's more of a "monkey see, monkey do" type of thing.

The thing you are describing is not the opposite of writer's block. It's something orthogonal to it, at least in my experience. I'm also quite capable of stringing together endless seemingly coherent texts about anything when there are no true personal stakes involved.

However, when trying to tell a story or covering a subject that I really care about, that's a whole other ball game.

For me it's not. If the subject matters, the same process can be applied, and eventually something good emerges from it. You just filter the crap out, shape it, and you have the base for something great.

The good old advice of "just start writing" is easy to follow when words flow naturally.

And it works.

This is is not good writing any more than curling a single finger a thousand times is good exercise for the body.

Oh, but good writing can come out of it more easily than just trying to come up with something good from the start.

It's easier to filter than to shape. And easier to shape something already filtered than shaping from a blank page.

Also, not all writing have to be good. A lof of them already have value if they are not bad.

After all, writing for the purpose of writing is a beautiful endeavor, but writing for sharing information is a great in itself, and a perfect but non-existing reference will always worse than a dry but at hand paper.

I wish I could hire someone who had the same attitude toward writing... Hard to find!

I used to do that job when I was young to pay for university.

The problem is as you become an adult, you don't feel like writing about a topic you don't care anymore, even for money.

So I'm guessing the one remaining are very expensive.