Have you every tried firing a gun with no bullets
have you every tried making coffee without adding coffee grounds
have you ever tried painting without paint
Have you ever tried to build a house without bricks
Have you ever tried to bake a cake without eggs butter or flour
Of course not
Why?
Because you know what would happen.
So answer me this,
Have you ever sat down to write without knowing what you want to say?
uh oh…
If it makes you feel any better I’ve done it too and I think it’s the biggest cause of writers block among lit review writers today.
It’s easy to circumvent this as well. If you were trying to build your house and you had no bricks, you wouldn’t just stand there and stare at the ground. You would try and build it without bricks and produce a house out of thin air.
You would go to the hardware store and buy some bricks.
In the same way, if you feel your writing drying up, ask yourself if you know what you want to say. If you don’t go to the literature review equivalent of the hardware store and get some words to put on the page.
The literature review hardware store
If you want bricks there are only a limited number of places you can get them from. Luckily for you though, there are loads of places where you can find your literature review words.
The first thing I do is go back to my literature review planning documents and work out why I don’t know what I have to say. Have I deviated from my plan? Have I run out of things to say or did I simply forget what I was supposed to be writing about? If I forgot then I can just look at my plan and go back to writing. However if I’ve run out of things to say then I really need to generate some more ideas.
One of the easiest ways though is to go to a sheet of A4 paper and sketch out ideas for things that you need to talk about. Based on what you have read and written, write down questions that pop into your head that you think you should answer with your literature review.
So, no more writing impotence! Get back to the drawing board and work out what it is you want to say.
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