Writing With A Timer: How to Combat Writer's Block and Get Words on the Page

When COVID-19 was breaking news and lockdowns were first mandated across the nation, I could hardly believe my good luck. Although I was still working from home, I suddenly had hours upon hours of free time with absolutely nothing to keep me from writing. I made big plans to finish the novel-in-stories I’d been working on for the past year; to polish up and send out the handful of short stories I’d been sitting on; and to get back to the novel I started years ago and never finished. I figured that by the time we beat the virus and were walking around mask-free and friendly as could be, I’d have a stack of fiction just begging to get published.

Except I didn’t write.

With the whole day stretching before me, there was simply no pressure to write now. I’d sit in my big chair and stare at my computer screen. And stare and stare. Even though I was in the middle of a project and I knew what I needed to write, I couldn’t make myself do it. Without the constraint of a busy schedule—being forced to hurry up and get words on the page before scarfing down breakfast and dashing out the door to corral a classroom of six-year-olds—I had an incredibly difficult time adhering to my morning ritual and actually writing.

I’d like to say that I immediately turned to the great authors of the age for advice on how to combat this problem, but the truth is I simply gave up for a while. I let the looming vacuum of time swallow my lofty writing aspirations. I read a lot. I walked 276 miles in five weeks. I sat on my balcony and drank beer and smoked occasional cigarettes and watched my dog play with the neighbor kids. Weeks passed, then months.

On the brink of spiraling into an existential crisis during which I was bound to delete everything I’d ever written and vow to never tell a story again, I happened to open an email from Writing Workshops Dallas. It was a brief article about how to combat writer’s block. The author suggested setting a timer for five minutes, writing madly, and stopping the second the alarm buzzed—even if you were in the middle of a sentence.

I started doing this and found I was almost angry when the time ran out. I wanted to keep writing. I lengthened the time to ten minutes. Then twenty. Thirty. I found that I could write as much in those thirty minutes as I was used to writing in two hours, back in the days when I’d been faithful with my daily routine. Sometimes the words were really rough, but other days they were actually pretty good. And whether good or not, they were words on the page. I was back in the game.

Writer's Block is Having Too Much Time on Your Hands

In an interview with Noah Charney, Jodi Picoult comments on the benefit of having a limited time to write: "I don’t believe in writer’s block. Think about it — when you were blocked in college and

had to write a paper, didn’t it it always manage to fix itself the night before the paper was due? Writer’s block is having too much time on your hands. If you have a limited amount of time to write, you just sit down and do it. You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page."

Whether it’s an impending deadline or an alarm on your smartphone, limiting the time you spend writing forces you to narrow your focus. This is not the time for daydreaming or researching, but actually writing. (Though daydreaming and researching and reading and long walks and good conversations are all part of the writing process, what we’re talking about here is getting words on the page.) When you are up against the clock, you can’t afford to let your mind wander. You just write.

Shitty First Drafts

Of course, what you write might not be any good.

As Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird, "Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something -- anything -- down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft -- you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft -- you

fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

However Halting or Perfunctory the Writing Is, Write

I love how similar this advice is to that given by Dorothea Brande sixty years earlier in her book Becoming a Writer, where she says, "Write. . . anything at all. Write sense or nonsense, limericks or blank verse; write what you think of your employer or your secretary or your teacher; write a story synopsis or a fragment of dialogue, or the description of someone you recently noticed. However

halting or perfunctory the writing is, write. If you must, you can write, 'I am finding this exercise remarkably difficult,' and say what you think are the reasons for the difficulty. Vary the complaint from day to day till it no longer represents the true state of affairs."

The Magical Timer

Jodi, Anne, and Dorothea all seem to agree that shitty first drafts—just getting words, any words, onto the page—is the place to start. Which brings us back to the problem of simply getting started on that shitty first draft. Which, in turn, brings us back to how helpful it is to write with a timer; so helpful, in fact, that it brought me back from the brink of existential despair and gave me a new lease on my writing life.

Now that I’m writing again, and often with a timer, I’ve played around with some various ways to utilize this tool. I love how much flexibility there is and that I can challenge myself differently from day to day. Here are a few things I've tried, and that I recommend experimenting with if you're dealing with writer's block or simply looking to spice up your daily writing ritual.

Tricks, Tips, and Tricky Timer Tips

1. Like the Writing Workshops Dallas article suggested, set the timer for 5 minutes and stop writing the second it goes off, even if you’ve hit your stride and feel as if you could write all day.

2. Do the above, but give yourself a little more time. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

3. Write for 20 minutes, take a 5 minute break, then do it again. And again.

4. Set the timer for 10 minutes and see how many words you can write. Repeat and see if you can hit an even higher word count.

5. Flip that idea and give yourself a word count, then start a stopwatch and see how quickly you can hit your mark.

COVID-19 may still be breaking news, but lockdowns have ended and I'm back at work. I have to arrive bright and early and once again my time is limited by the natural constraints of my professional life. Even so, I still use a timer to increase my focus and challenge myself to be 100% dedicated to writing every single second until the buzzer sounds.

If you've ever used a timer to help you write, I'd love to hear about it in the comments!