Customer Reviews

Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer's Block

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If you have been paralyzed with a phobia for the activity you love passionately-the one thing that you crave to do with all your heart and cannot; if you loathe and upbraid yourself for your paralysis, then UNSTUCK will talk to you. And keep talking. This author understands that blocked place intimately and compassionately, and this book has shown me how to investigate (not push away) the fear and resistance to writing. For me this book is not so much about "methods" and techniques," although it includes those supports. No, this book is about the broken heart of your talent, and the return to the impulse that begs you to write.

It's nice to have all those other writing books, like Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron. But they assume that you will be able to write given a creative prompt. They don't understand why you cannot write. I read K.Bright's review. I wonder if he/she perhaps has not been truly stuck. I didn't want or need novelty when I was blocked-I needed help. I highly recommend this kind and skillful book.

I've had a serious three year block and have tried desperately to get out of it. I had looked at several books about writer's block and all of them were feel-good garbage or throwaway 101 Tips to...

Staw's book is the best I found dealing with the subject. As one reviewer noted, it's difficult to even take time to read a self-help book, because you tend to feel that it's one more case of avoidance or procrastination and the hour it took to read could have been spent writing. But Staw has some salient, psychotherapy-based points about those feelings--guilt and avoidance. She emphasizes kindness to oneself instead of listening to the inner hypercritic, and while this might sound like feel-good nonsense, the way she writes about it makes sense and this technique pretty common in counseling. Her examples of patients experiencing writer's block range from mild to extreme--which made me feel better. This guide by no means got rid of my block, but in some ways it gave me (or allowed me to give myself) permission to write sloppily. There's no way I can write as well as I'd like to, certainly not while experiencing a block, and I feel that Staw really nails it when she points out how counterproductive this drive for perfection can be. I've since loosened up enough to start writing small things without caring so much about the outcome (these reviews for instance)--and it's been a pleasurable step in the right direction.

I got fired up about my writer's block a few months' ago,

and read several books on the subject, including some that

are out of print. This book is by far the best that I've

read. Jane Anne Staw teaches you how to get to know your

inner writer, how to be kind and compassionate toward that

person, and how to mobilize yourself into writing. I've

read the book three times now, each time getting more out

of it than the time before. I cannot recommend it more highly.

She uses examples from all kinds of writers--businessmen

writing memos, lawyers writing briefs, grad students writing

dissertations, you name it. Staw obviously has an active

practice of being a therapist for writers with writer's

block, and she shares the nuts-and-bolts ideas she uses

in that practice.

This is a gentle, thoughtful and PRODUCTIVE book. It invites you to accept, face and work through the many, many things that can come between a writer and the blank page. I can personally testify that this book changed my life, and as a person who mentors a great many graduate students, I plan on giving each and every one of them a copy.

On top of everything else, the book is a model of what we are all trying to achieve: a clear, wonderfully-written entry into another person's being and thoughts. As the old saw goes, Jane-Anne Staw not only tells us how to be better writers, she shows us. Her writing reveals, on more levels than one, the payoff for gently confronting our resistance to writing. Her goal is to help you write with joy, and at least for me, it worked. (OK, it works most days and most of the time, but part of the gift of this book is learning to let go of perfectionism.)

Unstuck is a refreshing take on an age old problem. It is a much needed perspective, written in a voice that is accessible, honest, and powerful.
This is not a glitzy book with ridiculous theories. This is not a book about self promotion of the author. It is a book about helping people like me find my voice.
I thank Jane Ann Staw for this.
I am not someone who considers myself blocked, but aren't we all like that. Unstuck made me comfortable with the fact that I have trouble kicking off my creative process, and provided me helpful tools to find my words.
I have already referred this book to all my friends of creative spirit because I know the book will help them as much as it has helped me. Though they may be seeking the perfect brush stroke, or an impeccable musical note, just as I am seeking words, unstuck will make a wonderful addition to their library as it has mine.

I wasn't sure I believed in writer's block, much less suffered from it. After reading Unstuck, I realized how I had been avoiding the scary act of putting my posterior in the chair and writing. Staw's straightforward suggestions are seemingly simple: to be nice to ourselves, to start with only fifteen minute sessions, rewarding ourselves for the work we do, rather than beating ourselves up when we fail. They work: I finished a first draft of an important chapter of my memoir. I highly recommend this book.

This generous and gentle book is filled with suggestions for how to keep your writing flowing. Drawing from her years of experience working with every kind of writer, Jane Anne Staw brings us useful and practical ways to keep ourselves writing happily. Many of us have devised subtle ways of sabotaging our writing life. Jane has carefully looked at them all, and provides loving and realistic help. Fifteen minutes a day, she urges us, five minutes, just so we keep at it, and don't give up on ourselves.
At its core, Unstuck is a book about loving ourselves, being patient with our foibles, and finding a way to express our hearts and souls. Thank you Jane Anne Staw!

Reading Unstuck was like having a trusted friend take my hand to lead me through shoals and around quicksand to a safe and quiet place to recover my writer's voice. Jane Anne Staw's supportive words enabled me to begin to tune out my inner-skeptic, to silence that brutal self-critic hovering over my keyboard, and, as she urges, to have compassion for myself. The book has useful exercises at the end of each chapter; and examples, drawn from the experiences of Dr. Staw's writing-blocked clients, are motivating and reassuring.
Yet Unstuck is far more than a self-help workbook. Woven through the pages is the author's account of her own battle with writer's block. I loved reading about her transformation, from a sleep-deprived college student struggling to write even one sentence of paper due the next morning -- did she write that just for me? -- to a "real" writer. A writer who is confident of her process and dedicated to her practice. A writer who now can declare that, once in a while, writing makes her ecstatic. It is her journey to fluency, a pilgrimage bracketed by interactions with her astrophysicist father and punctuated with deepening insights, that I found the most memorable and instructive part of Unstuck.

I found UNSTUCK to be a wonderful guide to confronting and overcoming the obstacles that get in the way of our writing. For those of us who are tired of being told what to do it is refreshing to hear how it can actually be done. The author's personal story and the many examples from her work with her clients provide familiar scenes of frustration that are followed by the less familiar but valuable descriptions of working through. I felt reassurred that there are ways out of the maze of procrastination. No book is going to give you all the answers but this book shows you how to find the right answer for yourself and gives you the courage to move on.

Unlike most books for writers, this one assumes that you are already a writer of some kind, and treats you intelligently and sympathetically, exploring the various fears that are common among writers and are at the root of writer's block, and ways to work through them. The book assumes that all writers have their own backgrounds, their own way of working, and their own individual quirks, so it does not prescribe a set program that everybody should follow. Instead, it talks about how to use your own personality and techniques to get you past the block and put your butt back in the chair.

Some of the examples seem pretty extreme. There are successful writers out there, apparently, who develop such a strong block that they have panic attacks when they sit down to write, or even just look at their computers. I figure if Dr. Staw's approach can help them, it can help me. I don't really fear writing (or do I? the book made me think about that), I just have trouble getting to it. Several times I read what she writes and thought, that's not me, then realized hours or even days later that the writers she describes aren't as different from me as I wanted to think they were. It gave me a lot of insight into the way I approach my writing, how I think about it, how I think of myself as a writer (a not-quite-real writer--there's a whole chapter about that).

The funny thing is, I realized early in the book that I was actually using the book as an avoidance technique to help justify not writing. After all, if I was reading about writer's block, then obviously I was doing something about it, so that's almost as good as writing. Of course, the best thing I could have done was put my butt in my chair and my fingers on the keyboard, even if only for a few minutes, rather than keeping my nose in a book. But I'm glad I read it anyway.

If you want to understand your writing mind, your fears about writing, how to get past that inner critic, and so on, the book is worth the time it takes to read it, and the time it takes to digest what you've read.