Blast Away the Block with Backcountry (Part II):

Strategies for Conquering Writer’s Block and Crafting Extraordinary Essays

By Margaret M. Kelly — Expedition Leader

3 - Try Lovely Little Lists

If writing full paragraphs feels, at the moment, too daunting, it can help to start with a list. It can also help to start small, bulleting early childhood victories. Writing about early accomplishments can make writing about more recent accomplishments more fluid, and one great way to start a personal statement is with an early-childhood accomplishment, discovery, revelation or even thought-fallacy. The point is to come up with an overarching topic for your list (whether it be proudest achievements, personal revelations, triumphs through adversities) and start bulleting. Remember your first draft won’t be even close to your last draft and the goal here is generation, not perfection.

A premise of the 360 blast-offs is that writing without structure can take you places; a premise of this exercise is just the opposite: structure, too, can take you places. Sometimes, if you confine your thoughts to short bursts—none longer than a line—paradoxically, they can become freer as a result. So take 30 minutes to draft your first list and see what flows forth. As with the products of your sprints, you can mine the bulleted material for golden eggs from which a sensational essay may hatch. Try not to be restrictive in terms of what makes it onto the list—you can pare them down, later, to isolate ideal essay topics or themes, but first, the goal is to get something—anything—out on the page inside a structure that makes some sense.

4 - Try Backcountry Mind-Mapping (just sit down, scribble and associate with abandon)

Like Lovely Little Lists, and Backcountry 360 Blast-Offs, Backcountry Mind Mapping is another exercise designed to unshackle your thoughts, drop your inhibitions, and get you writing from your heart. As it happens, when you write from your heart, your sentences acquire new intimacy, new propulsion—a pulse. Mind Mapping exercises are essentially associative. Your Mind Map doesn’t have to be a work of art, it just needs to be vaguely comprehensible—at least, to you. This is how it works: write an essay topic or theme in the middle of your blank page and circle it. Draw a line outward from your center circle and write the first, related thing that comes to mind when you’re looking at your topic or theme.

Considering each of your senses surrounding a particular topic or theme can be particularly fruitful while mind-mapping. For instance, if I were writing an essay about my passion for passion-fruit, I might start with passion-fruit, then branch off to the tropics—from there, I might branch to the sights, sounds, smells and sensations of those tropical places—from there, I might branch to the first time I ever ate a passion-fruit…what it tasted like, smelled like, felt like in my hands…how it made me feel, whether I daydreamed while I ate it, or ate it while I floated on a flamingo raft in the sea. And so on. Naturally, we associate images and narratives with our senses, so you might start with your senses and something as simple as a piece of fruit, and find yourself, before you know it, floating on a big pink bird in a sky-blue sea.

Ultimately, the goal with a mind-map is to free up your flow of ideas by charting flights of fancy. Once your mind-map is sprawling across the page, you can stop and take stock of where you started, where you ended up, and the insights you gleaned along the way. Armed with fresh material, you’ll be set to wipe that writer’s block right off your mind’s map and venture forward with grace and gusto.

We hope this helps!

TL; DR? Recap:

Anyone who has ever put pen to page has experienced the indignity that is writer’s block. Writing is hard. Writing admissions essays is harder. Especially when you’re asked to write promo material for yourself. But there are ways to knock-out the block. 1) Try shifting your angle—the goal here isn’t to self-congratulate, it’s to self-reveal. 2) Try writing for six minutes without lifting pen from page. 3) Or, if the prospect of complete sentences is too daunting, try crafting bullet-pointed lists to generate ideas. 4) If listing isn’t working for you—or even if it is—you might also try free-associative mind-mapping to kick-off a sensational, free-thinking essay. Whether you try these tactics together or just take one and run with it, writer’s block won’t stay in the ring with you for long.

Stay tuned for How to Knock Out the Block, Part III…