A student walked into his writing class the day an assignment was due. Everyone turned in their assignment except for this one student.

"Where’s your assignment?" inquired the professor.

"I don’t have it." The professor gave the student a "why not?" look. "I had writer’s block."

"There is no such thing as writer’s block," the professor replied.

So call it an anxiety attack. The truth is, despite all of the planning work that precedes the actual drafting of a communication product, many of us¾ me included¾ often feel intimidated by the blank screen when we start the actual task of committing ideas to specific words and images. We don’t feel able to proceed. In that sense, writer’s block is a real phenomenon.

Experienced communicators have developed these strategies for overcoming writer’s block. Try one; if it works, keep using it. If it doesn’t, try another.

• Start with the part that you know best, not necessarily at the beginning. Most technical communicators do not start drafting a technical communication product at the beginning and continue drafting until they reach the end. Rather, they draft the parts they know best first, then draft the other parts. After drafting the various pieces, communicators read through the entire communication product from beginning to end, and edit so that users do not detect that the different parts were drafted out of sequence.
• Freewrite. Draft as much as you can without worrying about how well you drafted. Later, you revise the text.
• Draft for a certain amount of time, then stop. For example, draft for two hours, then stop writing. The first part of the time period, you might not be productive, but as you continue, you’ll get into a groove and find yourself hard pressed to stop at the end of the two hours. (If you want to continue, do so.)

As soon as you have drafted a section, show it to someone else to get an immediate first reaction. The person you choose should be a trusted confidante¾ definitely do not show it to your client. When you show work at this early stage, do not worry about whether or not the text is written well or not. What you want to find out is:

• Are the communication strategies you chose effective?
• Have you covered the main points?
• Will users likely understand the approach?
• Does the trusted confidante have suggestions for making the information product more effective?

You want to get a reaction as soon as possible so that you can get feedback before you have "married" the text. The more time you spend revising the text to craft it "just so," the more invested you become in the draft. The more invested you become in the draft, the less open you are to suggested changes.

And, as a tee-shirt manufactured by the Santa Barbara chapter of the Society for Technical Communication notes about the drafting process:

In other words, the process for developing technical communication products involves extensive revision, so the sooner in the process you initate the revision, the less tedious a process it will seem.

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