Teeth grinding, tongue bleeding, jaw clenched. You, for a lack of a pretty, literary way of saying it, tough it out.

If you’re in the writing or marketing communications business, you know exactly where I’m coming from.

Some days, the words just don’t want to come. On others, the words come too freely. And then, on the worst days of them all, the words are flowing, but they’re not yours — they’re contrived and hollow and misguided.

But, unfortunately, writing in the world of business is rarely ever about satisfying the needs of the writer to cultivate and carve out their message and their idea. Ultimately, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with that because, point of fact, we writers are paid to write what we’re told. That control over my words can be disheartening at times and, yet, the voice is still mine at its roots, however manipulated and distorted.

But my advice is to fight it, all of it. For me, writer’s block is a sign I’ve overdosed on excessive quantities of bad writing. Bad writing (however gaudy it sounds, I know) is not about writing poorly. Writing poorly is the inability to construct a coherent sentence, string together similar or dissimilar thoughts, understand the more complex points of grammar, calculate and exercise tone, etc. Bad writing, on the other hand, is simply writing that lacks presence, risk and sincerity. It isn’t powerful but rather lacklustre and unimpressive.

So, I fight writer’s block the same way I fight bad writing: with a tight jaw, a stiff eye and a sturdy pen. Write until you find your rhythm, and do so in a comfortable, non-threathening environment where the chance of rejection is nil. Write until you stop searching for the words and they begin to find you. Because no matter how bad or how poor, the writing is essential, it is the heartbeat.