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If you're a writer you already know avoidance intimately. What you may not know is what it actually is, and that misunderstanding is exactly what keeps it running your creative life.
What Avoidance Actually Is Here's the reframe that changes everything: avoidance is not a time-management problem. It's an emotion-regulation strategy. Contemporary psychology is unusually unified on this point. Researchers Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl, two of the leading scientists studying procrastination, define it as the prioritizing of short-term mood repair over long-term goals. In plain language: when you avoid the page, you are not failing to manage your calendar. You are managing your feelings successfully, in fact. Avoidance works. For about ninety seconds, you feel better. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), psychologist Steven Hayes and colleagues gave this pattern a broader name: experiential avoidance the unwillingness to stay in contact with uncomfortable internal experiences (fear, shame, uncertainty, grief) and the actions we take to escape them, even when escaping costs us the things we care about most. Read that last sentence again. Even when escaping costs us the things we care about most. That's the tragedy of creative avoidance. Nobody avoids writing because they don't care about it. You avoid the work precisely because you care. The stakes create the discomfort; the discomfort triggers the escape. So the writer's equation looks like this: sitting down to write uncomfortable feeling arises behavior that removes the feeling temporary relief the relief reinforces the behavior That last step matters. Every time avoidance delivers relief, your brain logs it as a win. This is basic negative reinforcement, the same learning mechanism behind anxiety disorders, and it's why avoidance strengthens over time if left unexamined. You're not weak. You're well-trained. The Many Costumes Avoidance Wears If avoidance always looked like lying on the couch scrolling your phone, it would be easy to spot. But avoidance is a brilliant character actor, and for creative writers it tends to show up in disguise … often dressed as virtue. Some of its favorite costumes: Perpetual research. (My personal favorite) The writer who has spent four years "gathering material" about her family or her characters time period and hasn't written a scene. Research feels like work. Sometimes it is work. And sometimes it's a hiding place. Endless outlining and world-building. Screenwriters are especially vulnerable here. The beat sheet gets revised for the ninth time. The character bible grows to forty pages. Structure work is real but there's a moment when preparation becomes a moat around the actual writing. Premature polishing. Rewriting the first ten pages of the pilot over and over rather than facing the terrifying blankness of Act Two. Perfectionism, the research consistently shows, is one of avoidance's closest collaborators, especially the flavor psychologists call socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that others demand flawlessness from you. Productive procrastination. (Another favorite of mine) Answering emails, organizing files, updating your website, reading craft books. You end the day exhausted and can honestly say you "worked" but the script didn't move. Waiting for readiness. I'll write it when I feel inspired." "I need a full free day." "Once things calm down at work." Readiness is a feeling, and avoidance has learned that feelings can be postponed indefinitely. Starting new projects. (I'm very guilty of this one) The new idea always gleams because it hasn't disappointed you yet. Serial beginning is one of the most seductive forms of avoidance because it feels like abundance. Avoiding the hot material. This one is particular to memoirists and to any writer working close to the bone: circling the central wound of the story while writing everything around it. The chapters about the dead brother, the divorce, the thing that happened when you were twelve those stay "for later." Busyness and over-commitment. Saying yes to everything so that there is, verifiably, no time to write. A full calendar is an unimpeachable alibi. Notice the pattern: nearly all of these look like engagement. That's what makes creative avoidance so durable. It rarely announces itself as quitting. Where Avoidance Comes From If avoidance is emotion regulation, the useful question is: ‘’what emotion are you regulating?’ The origins differ from writer to writer, but research and clinical experience point to a handful of recurring sources. Fear of evaluation and shame. For most writers, the deepest threat isn't the work being hard, it's the work being ‘seen’. Psychologists studying fear of failure find that what people actually fear is rarely failure itself; it's the shame that failure might trigger, and what that failure would seem to prove about them. If the script is never finished, it can never be judged. An unfinished draft is a perfectly preserved possibility. Fear of success and visibility. Less discussed, equally real. Finishing means exposure, staffing meetings, submissions, family members reading the memoir. For writers whose nervous systems learned early that being visible was dangerous, success itself registers as threat. Perfectionism and identity fusion. When your sense of self is fused with your writing, ‘I am only as good as this draft" every page becomes a referendum on your worth. No wonder the body treats the blank page like a predator. Self-worth contingent on performance is one of the best-documented fuel sources for both perfectionism and procrastination. Trauma and hot material. Avoidance can be protective in the most literal sense. Writing about painful experience activates the memory of it. The research on expressive writing (pioneered by James Pennebaker) shows real long-term benefits from writing about difficult experience but also short-term distress during the writing. A nervous system that avoids that distress is doing its job. It just needs to learn, gradually, that it can survive the material. Intolerance of uncertainty. Drafting is sustained not-knowing. Will this scene work? Is this structure right? Human brains are prediction machines that experience uncertainty as threat, and research on ‘intolerance of uncertainty’ links it directly to worry and avoidance behavior. Writers with a low tolerance for not-knowing will unconsciously steer toward tasks with clear, immediate answers… email, research, formatting… and away from the fog of the draft. Depleted conditions, not character flaws. Sometimes avoidance has boring origins: sleep deprivation, overwork, untreated anxiety or depression, ADHD-related executive function differences. It's worth an honest audit. Not every avoidance pattern is a psyche-deep mystery; some are physiology asking for care. The internalized critic. Many writers carry a voice, often traceable to a specific teacher, parent, or early rejection, that narrates failure before a word is typed. Avoidance is a reasonable response to abuse, even when the abuser now lives inside your own head. Working Through It: What the Science Suggests Here is the pivot point, and it's counterintuitive: because avoidance is an emotion problem, the solution often is not more discipline. It's changing your relationship to discomfort. 1. Practice being uncomfortable, on purpose The most robust finding in the entire clinical literature on avoidance is this: avoidance shrinks your life, and ‘approach’ (gradual, repeated, voluntary contact with the feared thing) expands it. This is the principle behind exposure therapy, one of the most effective interventions psychology has ever produced. For writers, this means treating discomfort tolerance as a ‘practice’ not a personality trait. You build it the way you build any capacity: with reps. Sit with the feeling before escaping it. When the urge to check your phone or flee to the kitchen arises mid-draft, try staying for just sixty seconds. Notice where the discomfort lives in your body. Name it "this is dread," "this is boredom" because research on affect labeling (Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA) shows that simply naming an emotion measurably dampens the brain's threat response. Ride the wave. Emotions are physiologically self-limiting; the acute surge of an emotion typically crests and recedes within minutes if you don't feed it or flee it. Most writers have never stayed at the desk long enough to learn this. The dread you feel at minute two is usually gone by minute twenty but only if you're still in the chair to find out. Lower the bar until you can't avoid it. Behavioral science consistently favors tiny, consistent exposure over heroic bursts. Robert Boice's classic studies of academic writers found that those who wrote in brief, regular sessions dramatically out-produced binge writers, and reported less misery. Fifteen minutes daily beats the mythical free weekend, partly because it gives your nervous system 365 small exposures a year instead of a dozen traumatic ones. Write the hot material sideways. For memoirists facing genuinely painful content: approach gradually. Write about the difficult event in third person first, or write ‘around’ it, or set a ten-minute timer. Exposure works when it's titrated. Flooding yourself isn't bravery; it's a setup for more avoidance. 2. Watch out for convenience culture Here's the part almost nobody talks about, and it may be the defining creative challenge of our era. Legal scholar Tim Wu called it "the tyranny of convenience": we now live inside an economy expressly engineered to eliminate friction, effort, and waiting from every corner of experience. One-click ordering, infinite streaming, algorithmic feeds tuned by some of the best-resourced behavioral engineers in history to deliver frictionless micro-rewards. Why does this matter for writers? Two reasons. First, the competition for your discomfort has never been more lopsided. Avoidance used to be inconvenient, you had to get up, find a distraction, walk somewhere. Now the escape hatch is in your pocket, refreshed by machine learning. Every time drafting gets hard, an alternative offering instant relief sits four inches from your hand. The behavioral research on habit is blunt about this: friction shapes behavior more than intention does. If escape is frictionless and writing is effortful, willpower loses on a long enough timeline. The fix is architectural, not moral, add friction to the escape (phone in another room, blockers, drafting on a device that does nothing else) and remove friction from the work (document already open, next scene noted the night before). Second, and more insidiously, a frictionless life quietly recalibrates your baseline. Effort researchers like Michael Inzlicht have documented what they call the effort paradox: humans find effort aversive and derive meaning and value precisely from effortful activity. But tolerance for effort behaves like a muscle. When every other domain of your life is optimized to demand nothing of you, the ordinary difficulty of writing starts to register as something being wrong, a signal to stop, rather than what it actually is: the feeling of the work working. Convenience culture doesn't just distract you from writing. It slowly convinces you that discomfort is abnormal. Creative work is, and will always be, gloriously inconvenient. Choosing inconvenience on purpose in small daily doses is how you keep your capacity for it alive. 3. Defuse from the thoughts, don't debate them ACT research offers a second tool: cognitive defusion. You don't need to win the argument with "this is garbage" or "who do you think you are." You need to stop treating the thought as a command. Try prefacing it: "I'm having the thought that this scene is garbage." The thought can ride in the car; it doesn't get to drive. Studies show defusion techniques reduce the believability and behavioral pull of negative thoughts even when the thoughts keep showing up. 4. Replace self-punishment with self-compassion (this is strategy, not softness) Many writers believe brutal self-criticism keeps them productive. The data say the opposite. Kristin Neff's research program on self-compassion, along with a widely cited study by Michael Wohl and colleagues, found that students who ‘forgave themselves’ for procrastinating procrastinated less on the next task than those who beat themselves up. Shame is fuel for avoidance, it makes the desk more aversive, which makes escaping the desk more rewarding. Self-compassion drains the loop. 5. Make the plan stupid-specific Peter Gollwitzer's work on ‘implementation intentions’, "When X happens, I will do Y”, shows large effects on follow-through across hundreds of studies. "I'll write more this week" is an aspiration. "After I pour coffee Tuesday, I open the pilot and write a draft of the diner scene for 25 minutes" is an instruction your future self can actually execute. Decide in advance, when you're calm, what you'll do at the moment of contact, because at the moment of contact, the avoider will be making the decisions. 6. Reconnect the work to your values Finally, ACT's core move: clarify ‘why’ the discomfort is worth it. Avoidance always wins the short game; values are how you win the long one. The memoir about your mother is uncomfortable to write because it matters. When you can hold both "this scares me and this is mine to write" discomfort stops being a stop sign and becomes a compass. In fact, for most writers, the material you avoid hardest is a reliable map to the material that matters most. The Work Is the Practice Avoidance isn't a character flaw, a discipline deficit, or evidence you're not a real writer. It's a nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do, protect you from discomfort, in a culture that has made escape easier than at any point in human history. Which means working through it isn't about becoming a different person. It's about building a practice: small daily contact with the page, deliberate reps of tolerated discomfort, kinder self-talk, smarter environmental design, and a living connection to why you write at all. These are learnable skills. We teach them. If you'd like to learn more of these tools and practice them alongside other screenwriters, TV writers, and memoirists doing the same brave work, join our Level One class. If you want to build a consistent practice with community, join our MWF class. Or if you need feedback on a script or manuscript, join our Alchemy Workshop. Last month in our Cinema Master Class, we studied the complete feature filmography of Ruben Östlund, every fiction film, in order, and I cannot recommend this exercise enough for any serious writer.
One of the great gifts of watching a filmmaker's entire canon in a single month is that you get to witness how a storyteller actually grows. Not the myth of talent. The reality of craft, accumulated one film at a time. Östlund's first feature, The Guitar Mongoloid, immediately signals what will become his signature: he does not rely on plot. Plot is the dominant craft tool of contemporary Western cinema, and Östlund essentially sets it aside. What he gives us instead is world and character. The film moves as a series of vignettes, fragments of a social reality that felt largely invisible to mainstream cinema at the time. You can feel him working to make that world visible, to trust that observation alone can hold an audience. The connections between characters emerge, but quietly. He's not engineering them. He's discovering them. With Involuntary, you can see his craft sharpen. He finds a governing idea that will anchor his work from this point forward: within each vignette, within each character's world, there is an involuntary event, something that happens to them, not chosen, and the drama lives entirely in how they respond. The choices available to these characters are never clean or noble. They are the choices real people actually face: uncomfortable, face-saving, morally compromised. Plot is still not the engine here. Psychology is. He is learning to get inside the human animal in a way that traditional narrative structure doesn't always allow. Play is where you start to see him reach for something new. For the first time in his work, there is a singular, driving plot, a genuine through-line. A secondary plot exists alongside it and the two converge by the end. It's not yet the mastery he'll later achieve, but that's precisely what makes it so instructive to watch. You can see him learning. You can see him layering in a skill he didn't yet have, and doing it carefully, without abandoning everything he'd already built. By the time we reach Force Majeure, the film most audiences know, something has clicked. He has developed the ability to construct cause-and-effect sequencing, the engine of traditional narrative, without sacrificing any of his hard-won sense of world, character, psychology, or consequence. And here his thematic obsessions come fully into focus: social status, saving face, masculinity, the elaborate performances we give each other and ourselves. The tension between those who serve and those who are served, which he will radicalize even further in The Square and Triangle of Sadness, and which I suspect will be central to his forthcoming The Entertainment System Is Down. What This Means for Your Writing Here is what I want every writer in our master class to hold onto: there is no education that could have gotten Östlund to Force Majeure without him first making The Guitar Mongoloid. There is no shortcut through the work. He couldn't write fiction at all in the beginning, so he made a documentary. Before the documentary, he filmed his friends skiing down mountains. That was where he started. Please watch the early work of filmmakers you admire. Watch it without judgment. Watch it asking: where can I see them wrestling with the themes they would later master? How did they pursue those ideas before they had the resources, the collaborators, the budget? And then apply that same grace to yourself. As writers, we have an advantage: we don't need a million-dollar budget to begin. But your early drafts are meant to function exactly the way Östlund's early films did. They are explorations. Your first script, and your second, and your fifth, and your tenth, are not failures waiting to be corrected. They are the mountain slopes. They are the documentary. They are The Guitar Mongoloid. I think of my own drafting process this way now. The first draft is filming friends down the mountain, just getting something moving. The second draft is the documentary, getting the world and characters onto the page, making them real and visible. The third draft is Involuntary territory, where do the events and consequences start to emerge? The fourth draft is where psychology deepens. The fifth is where I begin to shape structure and plot in earnest. You do not have to do all of these things simultaneously. Most writers can't. It is not only acceptable to layer them in, it is, I would argue, the most intelligent way to work. This approach also gives me faster drafts, which matters to me. I am a sprinter, not a marathon runner. I give myself tight deadlines, not because speed is the goal, but because wandering in circles for years does not serve the work. Move through the draft. Get it done. Then get feedback quickly, before you have time to over-attach or over-ruminate. The revision always reveals more than the waiting. Before The Entertainment System Is Down arrives, and I hope it is soon, I encourage you to start from the beginning. A note: Östlund likes to sit in a shot. He will not rush you. If you find yourself getting restless, I'd invite you to replace that judgment with curiosity. Ask yourself what that stillness is doing to you as an audience member, what it is activating, what it is making you feel. It is a genuinely meditative experience, and an excellent antidote to the fragmented pace of the rest of our screen lives. If you'd like support with your own drafting process, learning how to move your creativity onto the page without self-judgment or critical interference, our Meditative Writing class is starting soon. For feedback on a script you're already working on, both our TV Screenplay Alchemy class and our year-long Masterclass offer structured guidance at every stage of the process. The work teaches you. Trust the work. Hey Screenwriters (and TV writers, novelists, memoirists)
If you've found yourself lost in the second act of your screenplay or manuscript, first of all, do not feel bad. Every writer gets lost in the second act. And honestly? It's a good sign. It means you're deep enough into the work that the easy part is behind you. There's actually a term for this feeling from the world of navigation: Dead Reckoning. Before GPS, when sailors were crossing open ocean far enough from Portugal that they'd lost sight of shore, but not yet close enough to see New York, they had to navigate by compass, speed, and trust alone. No landmarks. No confirmation. Just forward motion and faith in the process. That's exactly where you are in your second act. Here are a few ways to navigate through it. 1. Be kind to yourself. Just because it's annoying, scary, and/or hard doesn't mean it’s wrong. Getting lost in the middle is not a sign that you're a bad writer. It's a sign that you are a writer writing something new. If you are writing something original, it will always feel like you are driving in pitch-black darkness with one headlight and can only see two feet in front of you. You are building the road as you are driving on it. If the road were already there, you would be writing something that already exists. 2. Trust that the answer is to keep writing. And don’t be petty about pages. Write through it. Keep going until you can see the shore on the other side. If you're the kind of writer who worries about "wasting pages", pages that won't make the final draft, here's the truth: you have no idea which scenes are going to get you there. You are still writing to discover the story, the characters, the choices, and sequences that will carry you to the end. I've never met a musician who said, "My goal is to play guitar as little as possible while making this album." So accept that you are going to write a whole lot more than 110 pages in order to arrive at the 110-page draft you actually want. Prioritizing the least amount of writing over getting a great draft done will leave you disappointed. Great writers, prolific writers, accept the truth that they might need to rewrite a scene dozens of times to get it to where it needs to be. Just like great athletes practice plays and passes hundreds of thousands of times to compete professionally. How many times do you think a professional pianist rehearses a single song? A LOT! 3. Talk to your characters. They're right there. Sit down and have a conversation with them. Ask: "What are some ways we could get from where we are right now to the end of this story?" “What do I not yet understand about you?” This is something we practice in the Meditative Writing classes, going back into the world of the story and letting the characters lead. If you don’t have much time, this is a great way to connect with your characters and story during your lunch break or on your commute to work. 4. Map out your four possible endings. Every story has four possible outcomes for the protagonist: - They get what they Want and what they Emotionally Need - They get what they Want but not what they Emotionally Need - They don't get what they Want but get what they Emotionally Need - They don't get what they Want and don't get what they Emotionally Need Try writing all four of those endings as rough sketches, then pick the one you're most excited about and write toward it. And when you're choosing how to get there, don't ask: "What's the quickest route?" Ask: "What's the most fun? The most surprising? The most true to my genre? The most thrilling?" Ease and convenience are not the goals. Great art is. 5. Get feedback. Sometimes what gets you to the next shore is another pair of eyes. In a workshop like the TV & Screenplay Alchemy Workshop, you get professional feedback, you hear how other readers are experiencing your work, and you walk away with a clear to-do list for your next draft, a compass to navigate by when the horizon feels blank. You are not lost… at least not forever. Trust your course, keep writing, and the shore will appear. Have you ever wondered any of the following?
Why am I struggling to write? Do I have writer's block? What even is writer's block? Why do I resist writing? I really want to write, but I don't want to sit down and do it. I just stare at the page. Or when you finally sit down to write, you suddenly get up and start doing something else. That sock drawer is suddenly really in need of organization. Here are five important things to understand about writer's block before you give up. 1. Every writer experiences resistance to writing. I've worked with writers who are brand new to writing, and I've worked with Academy Award nominees. So if you're thinking, "I just need an agent, and then the resistance will go away," or "I just need to sell the script, and then I won't have writer's block", I hate to tell you, but that's not going to happen. In fact, the more successful you become, the more stress and pressure you have to perform. It's important to learn how to deal with resistance to writing before you become a professional writer. So practice bravery (which requires fear to be present), and let’s build stronger writing habits. 2. Sometimes it's a deep issue. And sometimes it's not. Writer's block can run deeper than productivity tips can reach. You might be diving into difficult material, and you may benefit from talking with a therapist. Other times, you are giving in to completely irrational fears. We can create a plan for that. 3. Regular writing is the key, and daily writing is easier than you think. It's actually harder to write three times a week than it is to write every day. When you do something every day, you stop negotiating with yourself about whether or not to do it you just accept that it's part of your life. If you can commit to writing every single day, even for just five minutes, you'll find that after about 45 days, it becomes significantly easier, because you've removed the daily internal debate. Remember: If you can't write for five minutes, you can't write for 50. 4. You're probably setting goals that are working against you. Most people don't understand how to set goals in a way that creates the brain chemistry that makes you eager and excited to write. Instead, they're setting goals that release stress hormones, which makes writing feel even harder. Getting your goal-setting right is a game-changer. 5. Treat writing like a meeting with your boss and create a ritual. Block your writing time on your calendar as if it's a non-negotiable appointment. Then build a warm-up ritual for yourself. Here's the truth: it's not always the writing that's hard; it's the starting that trips most writers up. That's why athletes have pre-game routines and dancers have warm-ups. If you make your ritual ridiculously easy, you'll find it much easier to get into your writing. These are some of the things we explore in the Meditative Writing Level One class. Join us for our next round so you can develop a writing process that helps you suffer less, write more, and to make sure your writing is reaching its full creative potential. If you need feedback on your script/manuscript, check out our TV/Screenplay Alchemy Workshop or Mentorship and Consultations. |
Jess HindsCreator of Meditative Writing. 
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