All sorts of things can cause paralysis in a writer – failure, success, a blank page – but at the root of each, I think, is fear. Writing is scary, partly because it has an alchemical relationship with thinking which is poorly understood. Through writing, you can learn things you didn’t know before, and that includes things about yourself.
Those things can be uncomfortable, upsetting, daunting. No wonder so many people are scared of writing to the point of paralysis.
This even happens to experienced writers. It happens to me. It’s been present over the last couple of weeks, since my previous blog post was picked up by the LSE Impact Blog and was widely circulated on Twitter. How can I follow that, I thought? What should I write next? I’ve been completely unable to decide: I started one post, then another, but nothing seemed right.
I remembered a young man I encountered a while ago who was determined that every year of his life should be better than the last: more fun, higher achieving, superior in every way to the previous year. So far, he’d managed it, and he was convinced he could continue in that vein for the whole of his life. Only if you die young, I thought to myself, but I didn’t say so; it would have been a shame to shatter his illusions. But I don’t believe it’s possible. If he lives long enough, a year will come when he gets his heart broken, or someone very important to him dies, or he is diagnosed with a crippling illness – or just has a mediocre year. That’s life. Ups and downs. 
And that’s the writer’s life, too. Thinking about that young man, I understood that in a way I was trying to emulate him, and it wasn’t possible. Then I realised afresh what in fact I’ve known for many years: the only cure for writer’s paralysis is to write. Don’t give in to the fear. Put some words on the page. It doesn’t matter how good or bad they are – that never matters – the point is to have some words to work with. Forget the failure and the success: cover that blank page, and the fear goes away. Never completely, at least not in my experience, but the more you write, the more you can keep it at bay.
. While this post makes some excellent points, its title and first sentence don’t differentiate between article and conference abstracts. The standfirst talks about article abstracts, but then the first sentence is, ‘Abstracts tend to be rather casually written, perhaps at the beginning of writing when authors don’t yet really know what they want to say, or perhaps as a rushed afterthought just before submission to a journal or a conference.’ This, coming so soon after the title, gives the impression that the post is about both article and conference abstracts.
I think the time has come to declare that I will not do any more unpaid work for rich organisations.
Very unusually for me, I don’t feel like working. I have a list of my current projects, all of which are interesting, and usually I’d look at the list and decide what to focus on next: either the most urgent, or the most appealing. But right now – and this hardly EVER happens – none of them are urgent. And, oddly, I’m finding it hard to motivate myself to work on any of the non-urgent ones either. Even though they do need doing, and will become urgent if I don’t do them at some point.
and now I have some fantastic news to share. Last week was the deadline for the 
forward to reading it and learning about a point I hadn’t previously considered. And the content did deliver new insight – but it delivered it really, really badly. It was such a disappointment, like getting the pizza you ordered an hour late, cold, and with your favourite ingredient missing.
different journals. So I added that reference, too, to my review, and ended with some words of encouragement. I truly think this is an important article in the making, and with a little more work, the author could deliver his or her argument in an article which is more like a warm, fragrant, appetising pizza, made from good ingredients in the right proportions.
of reading.
Helen Kara 