White out: how to defeat the blank page

Every academic knows the feeling: you sit down to write and the blank page stares back like an unblinking critic. The reality that writing is hard work only compounds fears of the white abyss. So all too often this – the very definition of scholarly contribution – gets shunted down our schedules in favour of easier tasks.

Whether your challenge is getting started, staying on track or polishing the final draft, here are our top tips to shift your mindset from trepidation to action, ways to plan proactively and practical techniques to defeat the white blank page.

Shift your productivity mindset

Academic writing isn’t just typing words. It’s thinking, synthesising and shaping ideas through messy, iterative work that is sometimes invisible on the page. Yet many of us use word count to judge progress. That is a mistake. 

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“Every paper has a season of wading through thigh-deep mud with seemingly nothing to show for it,” says co-author Katie Burke. Our trick is valuing and acknowledging that thinking is writing and to reframe your mindset on how productivity is measured. 

So, try something different. Claire Nicholls says that “rather than putting yourself down for not being able to dictate a perfect manuscript from memory, acknowledge the discomfort as part of this hard work. Phrases like ‘I’m having the thought that I can’t write’ can help distance us from unhelpful thinking and shift our productivity mindset”. Embrace the discomfort rather than fighting it, and know that this is writing.

Getting started: make thinking visible

Following on from shifting the productivity mindset is to make thinking and percolation tangibly visible so that you are not starting from a blank page. 

To start writing, transfer your already tangible thinking to the page, giving yourself something to edit rather than beginning from nothing. Compile and use what you’ve got – scribbles and highlighting from readings, mind maps of ideas and linked concepts, your notes from a head-clearing walk or those crumpled sticky notes with half-baked ideas or sentences.

Or, try thinking routines suggested by Harvard’s Project Zero based on “visible thinking” research to help you get started. Although originally developed for K-12 educators, these routines, documentation and questioning prompts not only promote deep critical thinking but help put thinking on the page, giving you something (rather than nothing) to work with.

Here are a few of our favourites:

• Think, puzzle, explore: question prompts to get you started
  • What do you think you know about this topic?
  • What questions or puzzles do you have about this topic?
  • How might you explore your puzzles about this topic?
• Claim, support, question: helps draw out prior knowledge
  • Make a claim about (or give an explanation for) the topic
  • Identify support (things you see, feel, know) for your claim
  • Ask a question related to your claim or the support. What isn’t explained?
• Headlines: a routine for capturing essence
  • Write a headline that captures the most important aspect of the topic or issue
  • How does your headline differ from what you would have said yesterday?

Keep going: planning prevents poorly polished prose

Planning is the scaffolding that supports strong writing. Start with small, achievable goals. Nicole Brownlie says: “Having a goal of getting something, anything, on paper each day is useful. It gives me a sense of accomplishment, which breeds motivation. Some days I get a couple of notes, some days more.”

Another powerful tactic to defeat the blank page is the “skeleton approach”. Create an outline with headings and subheadings, then add notes such as: This section will introduce the background. This method transforms the blank page into a structured canvas. “Later, I flesh out the bones,” says Rachel Leslie. 

But the bones need not be assembled in order. Instead of attacking your manuscript from the beginning each time, try writing out of sequence, beginning with what sparks your curiosity or capacity for challenge. After all, thinking is rarely linear, so why should writing be?

If you are still struggling to keep going, make writing dialogic: talk through your ideas with a colleague, Zoom, audio notes or even an AI chatbot, recording the conversation. Explaining your idea aloud can generate a structure of the next paragraph to write. 

Polishing your prose: handover notes and dishwasher pomodoros

Musicians know well that starting practice sessions from the beginning of a piece of music only serves to rehearse what is already mastered with little progress on what needs polishing. The same goes for writing.

To help you pick up productively where you left off in your editing, Claire has further tips: “For me, it is having a large-font ‘You are up to here’ written in the document I’m working on or highlighting in green text what I’ve previously edited, which helps me avoid reworking what I’m already happy with. Lately, I’ve also been using ‘handover notes’ that I leave in the comments at the end of a writing session to know what to work on next. It’s been a game changer in working efficiently and helps give that push towards finally finishing,” she says.

Working in focused, shorter bursts is another technique we can learn from musicians. Although time-management tools abound, sometimes the simplest hacks work best. Katrina Cutcliffe recommends “if you’re working at home, try the ‘housework pomodoro’. Set the dishwasher or washing machine going, then commit to finishing your editing when the cycle ends. It’s a built-in timer.“ If you prefer tech, try pomodoro apps or Goblin Tools to break those last tasks into sequenced steps and help grind out the final version, giving you a definite working time goal to finish.

Conquer not the page but the mind

Perfectionism is the enemy of progress and ultimately it is our own mind, rather than the blank page, over which we must triumph. Aiming for final-version quality from the start is a sure way to stall, and ultimately good writing is hard work that makes reading easy for others. 

Writing efficiently means shifting your mindset, planning proactively and using techniques that make progress visible even when the page looks empty. And when the mud feels deep, remember Katie’s words: “This is still writing.”

Claire Nicholls and Katrina Cutcliffe are lecturers in curriculum and pedagogy, Katie Burke is associate professor in education, Jane Batham is lecturer in curriculum and pedagogy – STEM, Nicole Brownlie is lecturer in educational counselling, and Rachel Leslie is lecturer in curriculum and pedagogy (educational psychology), all in the School of Education and Creative Arts at the University of Southern Queensland.

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