Every writer has pieces that are genuinely difficult to write — not difficult in the sense of requiring research or technical knowledge, but difficult in the sense of resisting being written. The argument that will not cohere. The subject that feels too large or too close. The piece that has been started and abandoned several times without arriving anywhere. Writing a difficult piece is a situation that calls for a different approach from ordinary writing, because the methods that work for pieces that are not difficult tend to make difficult pieces harder.
The difficulty is usually not random. A piece that resists being written is almost always resisting for a reason, and identifying the reason is the first step towards addressing it. Not all difficult pieces have the same problem, and the same approach will not work for all of them.
What Makes a Piece Difficult
A piece can be difficult to write for several distinct reasons, and the remedy depends on which reason applies.
The first is that the argument has not been found. The writer has a subject — something they want to write about — but no clear position on it. The piece keeps starting and stopping because there is nowhere for it to go. This is the most common kind of difficulty and the one most often misdiagnosed as writer’s block. It is not a writing problem; it is a thinking problem. The remedy is not to keep trying to write but to stop and think — to go back to the notes and questions that should precede drafting and find the argument before attempting the piece again.
The second is that the subject is too close. The piece is about something the writer is too near to see clearly — a recent experience, a strong conviction, a relationship that is not yet resolved. These pieces are difficult because the writer’s relationship to the subject interferes with the distance that writing requires. The remedy here is time — not always available — or the deliberate adoption of a more analytical frame, one that treats the subject as material to be examined rather than as something to be expressed.
The third is that the piece is trying to do too much. The scope is wider than the argument can support, or the piece is trying to say several things simultaneously without subordinating them to a single central claim. The remedy is reduction — narrowing the scope, choosing the most important thing the piece has to say, and letting the rest go. This feels like loss and often produces a better piece.
The fourth is that the piece is about something the writer does not yet understand well enough. The difficulty is a signal that the thinking is incomplete — that the writer is not in a position to write the piece yet because the material has not been sufficiently absorbed. The remedy is more time with the material: more reading, more thinking, more notes, before the drafting is attempted again.
What to Do When the Piece Won’t Come
When a piece has been attempted and has failed to cohere, the most common response is to try again with the same approach. This is rarely the right response, because the approach that produced the failed attempt is usually part of the problem.
The first thing to do when writing a difficult piece is to stop trying to write it. Not permanently — but long enough to create the distance that allows a different view. A piece that has been wrestled with intensively tends to become less visible the more intensively it is wrestled with. The writer who steps away and returns a day later often finds that they can see the problem clearly, whereas they could not see it at all when they were inside it.
The second thing is to write about the difficulty rather than through it. A short piece of thinking — not the piece itself, but an account of why the piece is difficult, what is wrong with it, what it is trying to do and failing to do — often surfaces the diagnosis that direct attempts at the piece have not produced. The difficulty, examined from the outside, is usually more legible than the piece itself.
The third is to lower the ambition temporarily. The piece that has been conceived as something important and substantial is harder to begin than a piece conceived as a first attempt — a rough, provisional, possibly wrong version of what the piece might eventually be. A writer who gives themselves permission to write the piece badly is often able to write it at all, which is a necessary precondition for writing it well.
When to Abandon the Piece
Not every difficult piece should be finished. Some pieces are difficult because they are not yet ready to be written — because the thinking is incomplete or the distance is insufficient or the scope is genuinely too large for a single piece. These pieces should be set aside rather than forced to completion.
The test is whether the difficulty is productive or unproductive. Productive difficulty is the difficulty of a piece that is resisting a form that does not suit it — a piece that wants to be written differently from how it is being attempted. This difficulty tends to contain clues: a section that keeps working, an argument that keeps emerging even when it is not the intended one. Unproductive difficulty is the difficulty of a piece that is simply not yet possible — where nothing is working and there are no clues about what would work. This piece should be set aside.
Writing a difficult piece is not a test of perseverance. It is a diagnostic problem — a situation in which the difficulty is providing information about what the piece needs, and the writer’s job is to read that information rather than to override it.
The piece that is difficult is almost always telling you something. The question is whether you are listening.
