Writing can feel like an insurmountable challenge, whether it's a simple email or a complex essay. This episode dives into the heart of writing anxiety and explores how it affects our students. In this excerpt from her audiobook, The Confidence to Write, Liz Prather discusses the common struggles students face from writer's block to perfectionism and how these issues can make writing feel like an impossible task. Stay tuned for strategies Liz uses with her students every year to address writing anxiety.
Below is a full transcript
Liz Prather:
Writing anything, a short wedding toast for your cousin, an email to your boss, an essay for a graduate class invites existential fear. Some writers have likened it to standing on an empty stage alone with nothing to say while facing an audience or a firing squad. When the page is blank, anything and everything is possible. Marring the pristine page feels like a desecration, a walk through new fallen snow. Do we dare disturb the universe with our imperfect scratches at meaning? If writing is an exercise of vision and choice, then making the wrong choice spoils the vision. We intellectually know a first draft can be revised, but that doesn't stop our heart from lying to us about the stakes of wrong turns. All writers have felt this distress in an interview from the Paris Review, Joan Didion says, "Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel and sometimes all the way through."
When student writers experience blank page anxiety, they may think they're alone in this dread, that no one else in the history of writing was so much of a loser as to not be able to write a single word. They often compound the anxiety by beating themselves up, engaging in a self-defeating inner monologue that deadlocks them further. And they fail to do the one thing that could decrease the anxiety, writing. Many developed the evil triad of writing sabotage, writer's block, procrastination and perfectionism. In my senior writing class, which operates as a writing community with several protected days of uninterrupted studio time to create and write, I noticed three distinct patterns of behavior during our writing days. The students all tumbled in as the tardy be rang at 10:02 AM. A few of them immediately grabbed their Chromebooks, pulled out their daily work logs and started to write.
No preamble, no fuss, just sat down and got after it. Another larger subset needed time to ease into the class. They found their seats then wandered around bothering other like-minded individuals or fixed themselves a cup of coffee or spent some time selecting the right playlist. That ritual lasted until around 10:15 AM. once started, they were as industrious as the first group. But the last group truly struggled. Even with cues like the tardy bell, the other students typing, the silence in the room, they still needed external nudges. I passed by their desk at 10:20, then again at 10:30, maybe again at 10:45. Hey, what's on the agenda today? I might start out. They would pull out their daily work log and sometimes get to work or not. Nothing seemed to produce the inspiration or the conditions in which they could write. Sometimes they asked me to step out into the hall.
Sometimes they cried.
"I'm just not a good writer."
"Who said that?" I looked around pretending to be offended.
"Nobody."
They wiped their eyes. I tried to draw them out. Then we talked about the lies we tell ourselves. Namely, that good writers come in and sit down and get after it because they know what they want to say and how they want to say it. That is a lie, I reminded them. But those first few kids looked like they knew what they were doing. They looked like they knew what they wanted to say and how to say it. To my students who could not settle in, it seemed like those other kids had something they didn't. Writing talent. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The students who couldn't find their groove were just as voracious readers, writers and thinkers as those stop-dropping write writers. What they didn't have, however, was a way to manage their anxiety in order to get started.
They needed a strategy to withstand the initial agony of not having those right words. The first set of students had figured out that writing was a time hustle, to start early enough to plan and write or write the crappy draft quickly to craft later. For a host of reasons, both personal and institutional, many students never get to that point where they can craft an essay. And it's in revision where the real gains in writing proficiency occur. We often write in reaction to the circumstances of not knowing what to say and how to say it, coupled with the time crunch caused by procrastination. Instead of writing according to a proactive plan, a plan that takes into account research, drafting, and the inner resistance to get started, we often wait until the last minute, then panic write just to get it done.
We may be dissatisfied with the results, but so happy the discomfort has been alleviated. For neurodivergent students, the path may not be as simple or direct. Telling these students to try harder or stop wasting time adds to their shame of being seen as irresponsible and adds frustration to the anxiety they already feel. These students may need additional support, such as using physical counters to track time, writing down a specific schedule of smaller tasks, built-in planning or doodling time, they may need to double the time to complete a task. Some students had figured out if they sketched out a wonky outline or wrote a hot mess first draft quickly, they could bank the time needed to read it over and over again. Plus write it over and over again until it's semi-matched what they semi-wanted it to say or ditch it completely and start all over. And that fortifying themselves in the face of inadequacy and buying themselves time to revise and create seemed to be their talent.
Here are two meta-writes for students. Student Meta-Write one. Most writers feel anxiety or fear when they start to write. What does it feel like when you have a blank page in front of you? Do you feel excitement or dread or a mix of both? What tricks have you used to get started on a writing assignment? In Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic, she says, fear and creativity are conjoined twins sharing the same womb, the same birthday, and a few vital organs. If you kill the fear, she contends, you also kill the creativity.
"So I don't try to kill off my fear. I don't go to war against it. Instead, I make all that space for it. It seems to me that the less I fight my fear, the less it fights back. If I can relax, fear relaxes too."
Do you make space for your fear of the blank page? What techniques have you found for relaxing with fear instead of fighting against it?
Edie:
Now that we've explored the challenges of writing anxiety, let's shift our focus to how we can use this fear to fuel creativity. Following is one strategy Liz uses in her classroom. To hear more of her thinking, her audiobook, The Confidence to Write is available wherever you get your audiobooks.
Liz:
Talk about it. As a classroom teacher, the single best thing I can do for writers who deal with writing anxiety is to talk about it, share our stories, and ask other students to share theirs. Matthew Lieberman and others in a 2007 psychology science article write, that normalizing and naming the fear is a behavioral strategy called affect labeling used to quiet the inflamed fight, flight, or freeze limbic system. This labeling of our fears allows a community of writers to grow, build trust and empathy with each other through their stories. Expressing how the anxiety feels can help a student understand not only her emotions, but her maladaptive thoughts around the act of writing as well. Hearing others share their story confirms and reinforces that anxiety is a normal, even essential part of the process. Talking and sharing your thoughts with others is also a way to recognize and amend distorted thinking.
For example, I failed a writing assignment when I was in middle school, so I'll always be a failure at writing. If a student experiences anxiety around writing and hears a dozen stories of the same from her peers and her teacher, her own emotional reaction comes more into perspective. It's not the beastie in the grass, just a garden variety writing assignment. Teaching strategy for a small class. Write the words writer's block, procrastination and perfectionism on pieces of butcher paper and hang these around the room.
Ask students to participate in a silent dialogue, sometimes called big paper on the wall strategy with the words. They can write what these words remind them of or their experiences with these conditions or how these conditions make them feel. After everyone has participated, ask anyone if they'd like to share a story about dealing with these issues. After the class has had sufficient time to share, turn the big papers over and ask students to brainstorm coping strategies they may have used in the past to overcome blank page anxiety. Once everyone has participated, discuss the strategies. Have students vote on the five most effective strategies from the list. Copy those on an anchor chart to use for the rest of the year. An extension for this activity would be to create a smaller 8.5 by 11 inch chart of effective coping strategies for each condition to be typed up and laminated for future individual intervention.
Teaching strategy for a larger class. On handouts divided into three columns labeled writer's block, procrastination and perfectionism, give writers time to fill in their experiences, stories, and feelings around these anxieties. After they've written, ask two or three to share a story or an experience. After sharing, ask students to flip the handout over and brainstorm effective coping strategies they have used in the past or would like to try out.
About the Author
Liz Prather is a writing teacher at the School for Creative and Performing Arts, a gifted arts program at Lafayette High School in Lexington, Kentucky. A classroom teacher with 21years of experience teaching writing at both the secondary and post-secondary level, Liz is also a professional freelance writer and holds a MFA from the University of Texas-Austin.
Liz is the author of Project-Based Writing: Teaching Writers to Manage Time and Clarify Purpose, and Story Matters: Teaching Teens to Use the Tools of Narrative to Argue and Inform.