How to deal with a startling block: when your writing’s going well

Today, I have the pleasure of hosting Dr. Noelle Sterne (Ph.D., Columbia University) with a fascinating guest post on when your writing goes too well. Noelle is a dissertation coach and editor, academic and mainstream writing consultant, author, workshop leader, spiritual counselor, and persistent encourager. She publishes articles, stories, essays, and poems in educational, writing, literary, and spiritual venues, and her new column for graduate students and professors appears in Textbook and Academic Authors (https://www.taaonline.net/). In Noelle’s academic editing and consulting practice, she helps doctoral candidates wrestle their dissertations to completion (finally). Based on her practice, her handbook addresses students’ largely overlooked but equally important nonacademic difficulties: Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation: Coping with the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2015). Noelle also helps new “doctors” publish articles and books to further their careers.In her self-help guide, Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams (Unity Books, 2011), with examples from her academic practice, writing, and life, Noelle shows readers how to release regrets, relabel their past, and reach lifelong yearnings. Noelle’s ninth story for Chicken Soup for the Soul will appear in the volume Self-Care Isn’t Selfish in June 2025. Visit her at www.trustyourlifenow.com

Your fingers play the keyboard like a concert pianist, your pens run dry with astounding speed, your pages pile up like gold. “Wow,” you think, “this is how it should be! I’m gonna go all night!”     

But then, faster than a form rejection, more powerful than an editor’s frown, able to freeze your brain in a single flash, a horrible thought zaps you: I can’t stand it anymore!  

What? Why? A strange reason: Your writing’s going just too well.

A Strange Breed of Block

When we’re blocked in ways we’re all familiar with, the reasons are pretty clear—our infinitesimal progress; our search for the ever-elusive perfect word; the unshakable suspicion that, despite all our sweat, what we’ve written is still no good. But why, in heaven’s name, can’t we stand it when our words are surging?

The answers are puzzling. For one thing, the more we write, finding our voice and feeling our oats, the more this paradox can strike, and its irrationality throws us. For another, the emotion itself is hard to pin down. In a “normal” block, we recognize depression, frustration, anger, anxiety, or angst. But what’s going on when the work is going well?

When I diligently searched writing and other sites on the Internet, I found nothing about this unusual experience. Is it possible writers don’t experience it often enough to blog about it? Or that we don’t want to jinx it by writing about it when it does happen?

Seeking answers, I’ve observed myself—and I experience it with any type of writing—fiction, memoir, academic piece, raging polemic. When I’m flying along, my thoughts and words blend in that delicious can-say-no-wrong rhythm. I love it, savor it, float, and bask.

After a while, though, I’m impelled to get up from my desk. Suddenly restless, I pace back and forth, look out the window, stretch, and sigh. My stomach feels unsettled and I hit the half-gallon of ice cream.

The feelings sink into an unsavory brew of extreme nervousness, sweating, and, paradoxically, elation. My thoughts run wild: “It’s too good to be true.” “I can’t stand such pleasure.” “It can’t last.”

I sought out a few other writers who were willing to talk about this phenomenon. Like me, they felt baffling cocktails of anxiety, excitement, panic, and exhilaration. One writer admitted, “When my writing flows, I shake all over and can’t work.” Another said, “I avoid it because it’s too delicious.” A third confessed, “Getting stuck, I get depressed, and that I can handle. But when my creativity explodes, I get nervous, itchy, elated, giggly, and panicky, all at once. And I hit the chips or booze.” A fourth, like me, acknowledged he keeps fighting the effortless words, and a mantra echoes in his head: “It won’t last.” And, obediently self-fulfilling, it doesn’t.

Our Upper Limit

Psychologist and personal growth specialist Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap offers a convincing explanation. We all have borders, boundaries of joy, like we do of pain. Each of us has “an inner thermostat . . . of the ‘upper limits’” of success, happiness, and creativity we allow ourselves.

Hendricks admits with candor that he discovered his own “Upper-Limit Problem” early in his career. Happy with his position as a research psychologist at a well-known university, he found the work going well. “I felt great. A few seconds later, though, I found myself worrying about my daughter, who was away from home on a summer program.” After assuring himself she was all right, he wondered why he had gone from feeling so good to feeling so anxious. His realization applies to us all:

I manufactured the stream of painful images because I was feeling good!

. . . The thoughts I manufactured were guaranteed to make me return to a state I was more familiar with: not feeling so good.

And so with our writing. When we bump up against our upper limits of joy or exhilaration that it’s going so well, often unconsciously we activate ways to shut down.

We scrub the oven or recopy a hardware store list. Or we look at our current piece and let our Inner Critic out of her cage. “My thesis is abstruse. No one will understand it!” “I can’t get through all these chapters. There’s so much more to go!” “This novel is so bad I should stop now.” “I’ll never get it published.”

Why We Can’t Stand It

We must discipline ourselves to extend our borders for good. When pain gets too much, we generally do something to dilute it—visit a professional, schedule an operation, swallow a pill, practice meditation. When joy gets too much, we also activate mechanisms to “remedy” it, reduce it, or shut it down. Following Hendricks, we worry, perform unnecessary to-dos, overeat, oversleep, overgossip, overtext, and overFacebook .

A logical explanation is suggested in The Writer’s Portable Therapist by psychologist and writing therapist Rachel Ballon. “You may get so overwhelmed by the burst of creativity that you respond the same way that you do to frustration—by turning to a substance or activity that calms you down and relaxes you from your excitement.”

But this remedy has its prices. Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way shows us the unequivocally damaging effects of shutting off our joy: “When we put a stopper on our capacity for joy by anorectically declining the small gifts of life”—like our writing flow—“we turn aside the larger gifts as well.”

To show us how pervasive and goal-destroying denial of joy can be, Cameron cites horrific examples of writers, actors, painters, songwriters, and photographers who couldn’t stand the pleasure and torpedoed fantastic professional opportunities. An example: For a long-labored script, a screenwriter was offered representation by an agent, a major goal of most writers. The agent asked for only a few changes, but the writer did not make them—and so lost the prospect.

A (blushing) personal example: For a long time, I’d sent queries and articles to a writer’s magazine I craved to get into, with no success. When a piece was finally accepted, I somehow put everything else first and didn’t return the agreement for a year! (They graciously accepted the late agreement and eventually published the piece.)

To stretch ourselves, Cameron recommends giving ourselves joys in any area we’ve denied and branded as too luxurious: “expensive” raspberries, a set of watercolors, music albums we loved as kids, a gorgeous shirt. Some of mine are browsing in a large housewares store, a new writers’ craft ebook, a day in the forest (no electronics), a long nap.

Yours?

Combat the Surprise  

First, we need to recognize our bewildering reactions and then learn to tolerate and accept them. Most important, we need to extend our upper limit of joy about our wonderfully flowing production so it becomes a part of us and fosters our writing goals.

From other writers’ antidotes and my own, I’ve developed a few techniques to combat that reflex upper limit when I feel myself shutting down because my writing is taking off.

First, I promise myself to keep writing. Second, I do one or more of the ten things listed below. Try a few.

Shake Up Your Body

1. Get up. Get out of your chair and away from your desk. Run in place. Do ten situps or twenty squats. Jump up and down ten times. If you have an indoor exercise machine, use it. Take a walk—around the room, the house, the block, the forest.
2. Put on your favorite upbeat music and dance for twelve minutes.
3. Do one household task: Clean the bathroom sink, take out the garbage, water the plants, pet your pet, pet the plants, water your pet.
4. Cook. Make something that can be completed quickly (like sautéed vegetables or scrambled eggs) or something that needs little attention after initial assembly (like spaghetti sauce or stew).
5. Run out to the local office supply store and buy one writing supply. Choose something you don’t need and may cost too much, and that you’ve always yearned for and haven’t allowed yourself. (You know exactly what it is.)

Shake Up Your Mind and Feelings

1. Feel all those fear-anxiety-panic-terror feelings. Acknowledge them. You won’t get destroyed or punished, the other shoe won’t drop, your inspiration and creativity won’t run dry.
2. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and, right now, pour out your feelings and thoughts. No censoring.
3. Identify whose “voice” is scolding that you don’t deserve this exhilaration and the activity that gives you the greatest pleasure. Like a rope made of glue, that voice tries to tie you up to conform, to be what it wants you to be or thinks you should be. Whose choice is it? Whose life? No one else is living it but you. You have the strength to wiggle yourself out of that old voice.
4. Remember the wise words of the great philosopher Dr. Seuss: “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”  And repeat this chaser from life coach and guru Tama Kieves: “I allow myself to be uncorked, unabashed, and showered with delicious good in every facet of my life.”
5.  Every facet includes your writing. So take a deep breath. Open your arms wide. Shout out loud: “I can stand this. It’s not too good to be true. I’ve dreamed and worked all my life for this.” And every time the anxiety and panic demons hover and threaten, repeat this single self-booster, I deserve joy in my writing!

With these methods, you’ll surpass your previous boundaries and allow your writing not only to go well but fabulously, as it should.  Like a writing rocket, you’ll shoot right through your upper limits into the expanse of your joy. And, faster than a fifteen-minute break, you’ll be back at work and rarin’ to go all night.