What do you get if you cross a writer with a deadline?
A really clean house.
Just kidding — mine’s still a mess. But if yours isn’t, and that’s got something to do with our wee friend, writer’s block, then you’ve found your article of the day. Even those who don’t write understand the frustrations of the intangible force field that so effortlessly positions cleaning, laundry or calling your mom between you and a pending project.
This guide explores how to write faster and a few writing tips AI knows to help you overcome the Brain Wall.
The (Several) Annoyances of Writer’s Block
Writer’s block is the condition of not knowing what to write or how to get started writing. Rather than being solely a mental failure, it’s a physiological state in which your procrastination or “freeze” response is activated in the brain due to fear, stress, lack of motivation or indecision.
Inhibited activity in the prefrontal cortex is intrinsically linked to writer’s block, which reduces the neural activity that’s indispensable to creativity. The result is slower writing speed, interfering with projects, deadlines and morale. AI tools offer a ton of benefits to those suffering from writer’s block, helping overcome both perfectionism and procrastination.
So, what happens to writer’s block when you outsource the starting point to an AI writing tool, at least for a while, to spur you into faster writing?
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10 Ways To Shorten Your Time to First Draft and Get Your Writing Projects Finished in Less Time
If you’re using AI to overcome writer’s block, you’ve got the more generic (ahem, boring) ways to start a project, and you’ve got the pie-in-the-sky solutions to kickstart your synapses. Here are a few ideas:
1. Brainstorming
When your brain’s a storm, hand that storm over to AI. Ask it to draw you visual word maps, hooks, metaphors, persona shifts, you name it. Generative AI can perform the hard yards for you, or it can prompt you to rouse those neurons from sleep.
You might work with a platform to reverse-engineer from the end-goal to the outline, describe a solution without using common industry terms or summarize your message with an exact word count of 17, no more, no less.
2. First Drafts
An AI article writer can muster up a first draft to get words on the page and clarify the message. I’ve found it effective to break up the text sentence by sentence and rewrite each one. By providing messaging logic and flow, AI removes the need to hash it all out from scratch.
Note, you’ll probably want to restructure, consolidate and remove ideas as you go.
3. Headline Generation
AI can generate any shade of headline for you, which either sets the direction for the piece or at least provides an angle. On the market, you’ll find blog topic generators that give you the headers as a second stage, but be warned: Many of them are insipid and generic. Generative AI seems to take the cake on creativity here.
4. Thought Leadership
If you’re writing about a particularly boring topic, genAI platforms — ChatGPT, in particular — can detail common logical fallacies and connect your ideas to an audience or wider industry trends in novel ways. You can even ask it to write two or three openers for each section to renew momentum as you go.
Sometimes, inspiration lies right between the unconnected dots.
5. Editing
Writer’s block is almost synonymous with “over-editing” your thoughts before you’ve written them down. The advice here: Just write. Use free writing. Try writing sprints. Whatever you need. Make it bad. AI can pick up the slack later.
Once you have a terrible human-made first draft, use a rigid editing prompt to polish it up. Include grammar, spell check, structural issues and logical fallacies, audience targeting, brand messaging, word choice, clarity, tone and varied sentence length.
6. Handwriting Recognition Tools
In the past, the speed of writing was about how fast you could rock a typewriter or a pen. If your process involves cursive and fountain pens (or if it doesn’t and a change of medium might help), writing recognition tools can help you digitize content faster than retyping it. Just make sure your writing’s legible.
7. Dictation
Dictation is another good one — I’ve used this in Google Docs for real-time note-taking when ideas are flowing through my mind but not my hands. The formatting, grammar and spelling are terrible, but you can paste the raw data into Gemini or ChatGPT, and they’ll clean it up for you.
Another approach, if you’re working on a desktop, is to vocally explain to the AI system your raw ideas, then ask it to transform them into your intro, an individual section or your conclusion.
8. Explain the Idea in Full
AI can explain an idea to you as though you’re a CEO, a DevOps pro, a nonchalant teenager or a whimsical unicorn. Case in point, I just asked it to explain the insurance market to me as though I’m a cloud, and the results were impressive.
Use this to simplify and clarify (“explain the idea to me like I’m a child”) or get inside your audience’s head.
9. Have a Completely Different Conversation
Get AI to write you a creative story involving three items you can see in the room, for example, the obvious elephant, a paperclip and a red jumper. For a start, it brings you back to your senses, but it also sparks inspiration and imagination by making weird connections between the three items, which can get the creative juices flowing.
10. Make a Vocabulary List
Words in, words out. AI can make you a vocabulary list based on any number of constraints. Want to sound like a writer for The Economist? How about adding a touch of David Attenborough to your voice?
Exposure to new words can reconnect you with new waves of expression. Go for lists of 100 at a time. Ask for common idioms and similes. In my experience, the weirder the prompt, the better.
Best Practices When Overcoming Writer’s Block With AI
If you’re struggling to write fast, it’s tempting to just go with whatever AI throws at you. AI is not a human writer, and it’s not a replacement for human intelligence. Avoid the temptation. Follow a step-by-step mix of creative and procedural AI writing hacks and, above all, never just prompt, copy, paste and post. Always keep a human in the loop when you’re creating with AI.
Here are a few other helpful tips as you get writing:
- Set a timer: It’s just as easy to spend all day achieving nothing with AI as it is to achieve nothing with a blank page.
- Aim for completion, not perfection: As the French say, “better is the enemy of good.” Not every day will be a good writing day. Don’t wait for AI to achieve the final result. Know when to get into the trenches, and know when your work has covered the essentials.
- Switch platforms: If Claude’s not working for you today, try switching to another platform.
- Consider an end-to-end solution: Platforms like contentmarketing.ai are purpose-built for a collaborative process to save you the woes of writer’s block, AI SEO optimization and a bunch of other processes.
- Change places: Set yourself up in a distraction-free zone, put on a focus playlist and avoid procrastination. Leave the house if you need to.
- Set goals: If you’re frequently overcome by writer’s block, set goals to develop a writing habit and hone your skills. It’s just a phase, and AI is the champion of creating actionable short-, mid- and long-term plans.
Call in the Content Overach-ai-vers
Look, AI’s there for a reason. Love it or hate it, when you’re suffering from writer’s block, it gives you options. If you’re someone strongly averse to AI writing, use it as a tool to keep your creativity in check. Or, if you love writing with AI, use it to keep your critical writing skills in check.
Most writers I know feel that writing can be a “survival of the fittest” game. When it comes to the technical constraints and the fast writing speed content marketing requires these days, it’s not hard to understand why writer’s block is so prevalent.
The tools are there to assist you in cutting back your writing time and keeping productivity in check. Find a way to use them that works for you and get busy writin’.
