Techniques that Help Fighting the Fear of the Blank Page

Many students agree – starting your essay or any other written assignment is one of the hardest parts of the writing process. How many times have you sat and stared on a blank page without any ideas on your mind? Can you relate when someone is talking about the fear of a blank page? Do you find it hard to organize the writing process and simply start outlining your thoughts? Well, you are not alone! We all sometimes get stuck with our written pieces. Here are five techniques for you that will help you fight this fear.

Don’t Strive for Perfection

Many students (and even professional writers too) face the fear of the blank page because of their perfectionism. It’s hard to overcome the inner perfectionist and start writing at least something when you know that the piece will not turn out the way you want it to. Excessive perfectionism is often the main reason why we procrastinate and face difficulties with starting a project or task.

The best option is to learn how to fight excessive perfectionism. It all should start long before you begin writing – with the mindset of yours. There are some techniques that you can find online and incorporate into your everyday life. The main goal for you is to stop being afraid of making a mistake or provide a result that is not as high as you wish it to be. 

When it comes to writing – what you should do is to avoid putting it aside because you don’t have any “great” ideas to fill it with. Some papers are just meant to be not as good as the rest, so there is nothing horrible about creating a paper that is not perfect.

Practice Freewriting

Freewriting is a technique that allows you to avoid sticking with the beginning for a long time – and this is our goal when we are talking about the fear of the blank page. But what is freewriting? It is basically a technique when you start writing just random thoughts that come to your mind until you are confident with your “writing mood.” Many professional writers and book authors use this technique when they are stuck with some written piece. 

This method helps you organize your thoughts and simply start forming them into complete sentences, which in its turn helps you produce more thoughts and ideas that will be a great fit for your topic. So, just start! We know that it’s difficult, especially when you are facing the fear of the blank page, but there is nothing better than just overcoming this first sentence.

Drafting

Another great technique for when you need to start writing your essay is drafting. What you should do is start creating a rough draft with some points, phrases, quotes, facts that can be used for your essay. It should not be even organized at first; just throw everything you can think of or what you have found in the process of your research. Then you can start adding more details and evaluating your thoughts.

This technique is great because you don’t have to write your paper in a particular order – you can simply jump from one point to another when you feel you have something to add. Then, as soon as you have a few sentences for each of the points in your draft, you can structure it and change the order of the paragraphs.

Set the Timer

When you have set the time and the deadline, it’s much easier to get down to the business. Set the timer, for example, for 15 minutes when you will have to write without any stops and breaks. You will be pretty surprised with the result – as you actually can write a lot in 15 minutes. Don’t worry about the quality of what is written. Stop when the timer goes off, review the written part, change it, and tailor it during the next 15 minutes. Then you can have a break and repeat all the previous steps.

This method helps you jump into the process and avoid procrastination. As it doesn’t seem really hard – to write for only 15 minutes, right? So, it takes a large portion of stress and anxiety off of your shoulders and makes it easier to start your essay.

Partying Thoughts

If you struggle with the fear of the blank page, you should start working on your approach toward the writing process and the expecting results – as these are the main reasons why it is hard for us to write essays (well, for the majority of us, at least) or other pieces. If you still feel like writing essays is too hard, you can always turn to our professional essay service and enjoy your days without struggling too much with written assignments.