Five Ways to Overcome a Writing Plateau

If you feel you’ve reached a plateau with your writing, here are five strategies to try. Mostly it’s about trying something new, refreshing your horizons, so that you feel freer and jog your jaded neurons into firing and making connections in new ways.

1. Go on a writer date

Not a writer dating service! Rather, a date with yourself as a writer, devoted to a small, new experience to bring joy and variety into your life.

This is inspired by Julia Cameron’s ‘artist date’. Often, we try to work on, without ‘filling the well’ with fresh inspiration and experiences. Even something really tiny can jog your brain into new thinking.

A writer date might be go to a new café, walk a different route, pick up river stones, visit a charity shop, eat something unfamiliar. Make a plan, put the date in your diary, and head out to discover.

Why it works: you’re creating a fresh experience and different way of seeing. Habits can lull your brain, so you stop noticing. A fresh vista can waken it up.

2. Try deliberate practice

Deliberate practice is a deep-focus way to improve your skills, used in music and sport, and also in writing.

In creative writing, you can do deliberate practice through close reading. Mostly, we read for enjoyment or information, so we don’t pay attention to the craft or techniques the author is using. In close reading, you’re reading as a writer.

To do this, pick a passage from a favourite author, or go wild and pick something random from the bookshelf. If  you like, pick an area of craft you want to improve – say, characterisation, or chapter openings.

Then choose three examples and really dig into the language the authors use. Work out how they’ve achieved their effects, and how they make you feel. Then try out those techniques yourself.

Why it works: Deliberate practice helps you to look closely at language, rather than following the story. By reading as a writer, you can see techniques at work, and adapt them to your own voice. It’s a fast and effective way to expand your writing toolkit.

For more about this, check out my book, Deliberate Practice for Creative Writers.

3. Try morning pages

‘Morning pages’ is a daily freewriting habit, again inspired by Julia Cameron. First thing, grab some paper and start writing. No hesitation, no censoring. Just let your stream of consciousness flow. If you struggle to get started, just write ‘I’m writing, I’m writing’ until something comes to you.

What you write may seem trivial or repetitive. It doesn’t matter. These pages are only for you. They’re a way to practise flow and getting into the zone, without the pressure of showing your work.

Why it works:  Morning freewriting is unfiltered. It captures your thoughts at that weird stage between sleep and waking, before your critical, editing brain has had time to kick in. The thought that surface may surprise you – you’ll often externalise things that are hidden this way.

This is also a kind of meditative process. It helps you to focus in, and experience the act of writing. The more you do it, the more familiar the feeling becomes, and the easier you’ll find it to get started. Freedom from ‘performance’ can help you to overcome conflict between the writing and editing parts of your brain.

4. Try cut-ups

Cut-ups are a way to chop up existing text to generate new patterns and unexpected connections.

William S Burroughs famously used cut-ups in his writing, as did the musician David Bowie in his song lyrics. However, the technique is much older, and was also used by the Dadaist Tristan Tzara in the 1920s and even by the children’s author Lewis Carroll.

To try this, pick a random text from a newspaper or magazine. Cut it into words or phrases. Move around the snippets and see what emerges. Pick three at random and use them as a basis for a poem. It can be as surreal as you like! Make up your own rules and see what follows.

Why it works: We all have our own writing grooves and voice and rhythm quirks – distinctive patterns that we come to rely on. Cut-ups help to jolt our brain into new and surprising connections. You’re generating language you wouldn’t typically use, and forcing yourself to use it in a playful, low-stakes way. This can make you less self-conscious and gives you something to respond to, circumventing the blank page.

Also check out the Oulipo group, French writers and mathematicians who generated new writing by creating rules to force new and surprising forms of expression.

5. Write for fun

This may sound obvious, but fun often gets forgotten in the quest to finish the chapter, meet word counts, hit deadlines. We can lose sight of what we enjoyed about writing in the first place.

If your writing has got stuck in the doldrums, give yourself permission to play for a while. You could try writing in a genre you’d never normally write in. If you’re a crime author, write romance. If you’re a historical novelist, try science fiction. If you’re a poet, try a film scene. Or a recipe, wanted ad or manifesto!

Or pick a random phrase from a random book and use it to start a story. I once did this for 100 days when I got stuck with my writing, and went on to publish these stories as Nanonovels.

Lift the pressure, and write without justification, audience or outcome in mind.

Why it works: We can sometimes ‘run on empty’ when writing. This is often because we don’t know enough about what we’re writing, and need to do some more research. It can also be because we’re stale, and have lost a sense of excitement and discovery. Playful writing can help to loosen up our thinking and put us back in touch with what we love about creativity, its freedoms and possibilities.

Quick takeaways

• do something new
• take a break
• be playful
• lift the pressure
• enjoy your writing!