Help! I’m stuck! How to start writing when it feels impossible.
Does a blank screen cause you to shut down? Is your brain a jumble of ideas, but you can’t seem to organize them? Does the idea of writing about yourself make you want to binge on ice cream and video games?
You’re not alone. One of the common refrains I hear from my students is, “I don’t know how to get started.” This isn’t surprising – I, too, have a hard time getting started. Here are some of the tricks that have worked for me and my students.
What follows isn't a checklist to complete in order — think of it as a menu. Different things block different brains on different days, so try whichever one matches what's stopping you at that time.
Start with an outline, even a bad one. You don't need a formal structure. Three or four phrases — "the setup," "the moment everything shifted," "what I get now that I didn't get then" — is enough. An outline turns a blank page into a fill-in-the-blank page, which is a much smaller psychological hurdle.
Write the easiest paragraph first. It doesn't have to be the opening. In fact, it usually shouldn't be — openers are often the hardest part to write. Pick whichever section feels most obvious to you right now and write that one. Momentum matters more than order; you can always rearrange later.
Build a schedule and tell someone about it. "I'm going to write for 20 minutes on Tuesday and Thursday after dinner" is a plan. Making a commitment to your mom, your friend, or even Claude or ChatGPT tricks your brain into accountability.
Commit to 10 minutes, twice a day. Not an hour. Not "until it's done." Ten minutes is short enough that you can't talk yourself out of it, and it's long enough that something usually happens once you're in it. The hard part is never the writing — it's the sitting down. The best part is once you’ve written for 10 minutes, you’re able to keep going.
When you write - Just write. It doesn't have to be usable. Give yourself full permission to write something bad. Words on a page, not quality, is the goal for a first pass. You cannot edit a blank page, but you can absolutely edit a bad paragraph — so your only job right now is to make the bad paragraph exist.
Try body doubling. This is a real strategy (it comes out of ADHD coaching, though it works for plenty of brains besides ADHD ones) where you do a task alongside someone else who's doing their own thing, not collaborating, just co-existing — like a workout buddy. You're each writing your own essay, in the same room or on a call, at the same time. It works because an external presence makes it harder to quietly give up and scroll your phone instead; you're not accountable to them exactly, but there is someone “in it” alongside of you.
Don't edit while you draft. Editing and drafting use different parts of your brain and switching back and forth between them is exhausting and slows you down. Let the first draft be messy. You'll fix it later — that's what revision is for.
If a full paragraph still feels like too much, start smaller: just tell what happened. Write the bare bones of your anecdote like you're texting a friend — no scene-setting, no reflection, just the sequence of events. We got to the venue and the mic wasn't working. I had ten minutes to fix it before three hundred people noticed. Once that's down, go back and add sensory detail — what you saw, heard, felt physically — to bring the moment to life.
Here's the part that surprises almost everyone: once you have even a few rough pieces typed out and you can see them on the screen, your brain starts doing something it couldn't do while the ideas were still abstract in your head. You'll notice connections between your anecdotes you hadn't consciously made. You'll think of details to add. The writing, even bad writing, becomes a thinking tool — a step on the way to your final essay.
The Real Takeaway
You don't need to feel ready, inspired, or even particularly confident to start. You need a rough topic, a tiny time commitment, a little accountability, and permission to write badly. Everything else comes from revision, and you can't revise what doesn't exist yet.
So pick one memory, set a 10-minute timer, and just tell what happened.