At this very moment, I am sitting down at my computer, staring at a blank Word document, for the third time today, trying to figure out what exactly I could possibly write about for my article this week. The holidays are over. I don’t start classes for another three weeks. Not much is really happening.

The weather is getting colder, so that’s something, though really all that does is makes me more motivated to curl up in bed and watch movies and drink hot chocolate and less motivation to rack my brain for any scrap of inspiration that could potentially turn into a full article. This is nothing new. In fact, the ability to sit down, think of an idea, and write about it is the true rarity.

But the truth is, as any writer can tell you, writing is hard, and it takes a lot of time. It takes an unnecessary and unreasonable amount of time with very little actual productivity yielded as a result. It doesn’t take that long to actually do the writing. The same goes for basic editing. In fact, the most time-consuming part of the whole process is completely unrelated to writing. It’s the coming up with ideas, the creating of a voice, and the determining how to make the two work together. It’s finding the right words to start the first sentence because from there, if nothing else, you can work off of momentum. It’s the convincing yourself that you do have ideas in your head that are worth sharing and then the working up of the confidence needed to start actually writing. It’s discouraging, though, because this takes a lot of work that shares a scary resemblance with goofing off or even procrastinating.

If you’re like me, then, a battle with writer’s block might look a little bit like this. Let’s keep in mind this is a wholly hypothetical example. You might start by opening up a blank document. For the sake of feeling like accomplishing something, you head it with a fairly vague title such as “Odyssey Article for January 3” or “Insert Creative Title Here.” You then proceed to think of potential content themes beginning with your go-to checklist (every writer has one). Upcoming holidays? No. Recent life experiences? Nope. Changes in beliefs and/or opinions? Negatory. Thoughts on a current event? Nada. Existential rant on why traditional beliefs or practices may need to be reconsidered? Can I do that two weeks in a row?

If you’re desperate, you then try googling ideas. But you don’t use the standard “Article Ideas” because you’ll get the same results as last week when you couldn’t think of an idea. You have to keep your google searches specific so it’s impossible to duplicate it next time you don’t know what to write. You might try “Article ideas for online magazine geared toward college students” or “what to write about when you aren’t good at writing listicles.” When this doesn’t work, you try googling the person credited for saying that google has all the answers because a strongly worded letter to him or her is something you can write at this particular moment.

At this point, though, you’re so frustrated that even coming across a decent idea makes you sick to your stomach because you can’t write a halfway decent article on a really good topic, and all you actually want to find is a halfway decent idea that you can turn into a halfway decent article. But it’s hard to commit to a halfway decent idea with any conviction.

You decide that you’ve spent too much time in front of this blank screen, and what is needed now is some food for thought. Or just food. There’s nothing appetizing in your pantry, but there are all the necessary ingredients to bake oatmeal cranberry cookies, and you’ve got to eat something. So you justify taking like an hour break to bake cookies during which one of the National Treasures movies comes on so you choose to wait until it’s over to get back to work.

At some point you make it back to your computer and put on some music for inspiration, but you hear a new song with intriguing lyrics and embark on an internet quest to determine its meaning. You come to find out that it was just written for some Broadway musical about a rubber maker with aspirations of opening up an opera house. While this fails to live up to your expectations, you aren’t able to justify feeling letdown since the artist was at least able to write something of value. And while you’re researching this song, you come to find out that the band that sings it just happens to be made up of all the same members of a different band and that both bands sing the same songs and so you do a little research on this as well because, hey, that might make an interesting article, right?

And when you’ve completed your research and concluded that it actually isn’t worth writing about, you return to your still blank document and tap your fingers on the keys so it at least sounds like your typing. If you aren’t going to be productive, you at least want to have everyone around you fooled.

You might look up some tips for overcoming writer’s block, but none of them are really helpful, particularly not the one that says to write naked because while this is supposed to be freeing, you can’t even get your t-shirt halfway off your body before feeling so completely insecure that you begin to have a full on panic attack, as if writing naked is only a metaphor for exposing your writing to the world as vulnerable and subject to its criticism as your own bare skin.

This turns into a full existential crisis resulting in your writing a 1,672-word rant about why you actually hate writing and then seriously consider submitting it as your article just to put you out of your agony. You read over it, though, and hate it. You don’t want to just delete it, however, so you open a new blank document and title it “Insert Creative Title Here (Take Two).”

For the sake of getting something (anything) down on paper, you write “At this very moment, I am sitting down at my computer, staring at a blank Word document, for the third time today, trying to figure out what exactly I could possibly write about for my article this week.” And from there, you just work off of momentum.