A Revised Self-Treatment of Writer's Block

After the unfortunate successful replication of Upper’s Unsuccessful Self-Treatment of a Case of “Writer’s Block” three months ago, more work has been done to forward the understanding of writer’s block and to create a more viable self-treatment.

This revised self-treatment takes inspiration from The Most Dangerous Writing App created by Squibler, which involves deleting all previously written material once typing stops for five seconds¹. This strategy is implemented using the Dangerzone Writing plugin² for Obsidian. It is hypothesised that the punishment of deleting all previous work will push the test subject to overcome writer’s block.

There is some evidence that this method is somewhile useful.

Nevertheless, multiple limitations of this treatment have been identified. First, this treatment is found to discourage the test subject from writing anything at all, since not writing anything entails effectively zero potential punishment. Furthermore, the subject is found to cheat on multiple occasions by typing nonsense to keep the countdown from starting, thereby reducing the treatment’s effectiveness in pressurising the subject to write meaningful content continuously. Finally, as suggested by the last trial, the subject faces the risk of losing hours of hard work due to an external distraction such as the presence of a mosquito, which proves to be extremely discouraging.

Though only partially successful, the result of this revised self-treatment provides insights into how writer’s block can be self-treated more effectively than when using Upper’s method³ and provides possibly an outlier case for future studies. One possible improvement, according to Doctor Paticia Huston, is to provide positive feedba⁴