A blogger’s remedy for so-called “writer’s block”

I’ve gone through periods of what I used to call “writer’s block”, feeling like I was barely able to etch much more than my own signature on a credit card receipt because of it.

I can’t say what triggered these spells, except that I was left feeling like I had run out of something to say, which was anxiety-inducing all on its own. (I now consider “writer’s block” to be just a state of either having nothing to say or simply not knowing what matters to you in a given moment. In some cases, it may be a lack of motivation, but that’s a whole other topic.)

Almost without exception, however, the ice would eventually break apart and melt as a result of participating in the comment sections of other people’s online discussions, be it blog posts, news articles, or (egad!) even Twitter.

Not only did being an active commenter help me “get the juices flowing”, but it has over time helped me hone my rhetorical abilities, or has made me reconsider my position on a given issue before blogging about it.

In addition to the above, getting my feet wet in comment sections often renews my sense of which issues are relevant, or at least which issues are relevant to me. Conversely, I like to get a sense of what arguments are being made on either side of a given debate, as well as what arguments aren’t being made that ought to be. (To those pushing all-or-nothing absolutist positions, expressing a nuanced opinion may resonate with them as trolling, or at least as more of a…