: Re: What are some tricks for managing debilitating writing anxiety/phobia? For the past 4 years, I've developed a severe problem with writing anxiety. It's become so bad, that I had to drop out

@Samaraweera193

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The comments on your post suggest therapy, and I think it is good advice. This is more than just writer's block or procrastination. It sounds like you have serious anxiety that's triggered by writing. Here are some things you might try if you can't afford a therapist.

First, pick a book and copy the text out of it. This will help you get used to the physical activity of typing or writing by hand without being concerned with what you are writing. When you can copy text without feeling anxious, then you are ready to move to the next step.

Second, move around the text you copied. Try rearranging the sentences in paragraph, or taking one sentence out of each paragraph to make a new story with the same words. Don't worry about how legible it is. You're getting used to the feeling of editing. When you feel comfortable moving text around like this, move on to the next part.

Third, play with the text you copied. Take a passage and substitute a few verbs and nouns with a synonym chosen from a thesaurus at random. Rewrite it using different pronouns (instead of third-person "he/she/it/them", write it in second-person "you", for instance). Rearrange the words in the sentences. Remove all the conjunctions. Do some small things like this to help yourself see that the same thing can be expressed in many different ways, and none of these is right or wrong.

Fourth, write something short that's not important. Something that has no deadline or grade or degree attached to it. A fake advertisement for an imaginary product might suffice. Write as much as you can in ten minutes, and then walk away from it. Come back to it in a day or a week, and revise it until you like it, or throw it away if you hate it. Then do it all again next week. From here, work your way into writing some things that carry more baggage.

These steps will hopefully lead you to feel that you are in control of your work. Hopefully, a few exercises like this, and you'll be over the worst parts of your anxiety. You can do this. You wrote this question here, so that's encouraging!

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