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  • CAREER FEATURE

Twelve scientist-endorsed tips to get over writer’s block

How do you get your creative juices flowing after spending hours, days or months looking at a blank screen? Researchers share their advice.
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  1. Emily Sohn

    1. Emily Sohn is a freelance journalist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

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Paul Silvia was trying to write his first book — about the psychology of motivation — in 2003. He had a publishing contract and a deadline that he had missed, and although he was churning out shorter articles, grant proposals and research papers, he was not making any progress on his book. At one point, he went nine months without “even doing the smallest thing on it”. He could not motivate himself to work on a book about motivation: “The irony of that was totally apparent to me at the time,” he says.

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Nature 631, 241-243 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02013-4

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