The idea of writer's block, in its ordinary sense,
Exists largely because of the notion that writing should flow.

But if you accept that writing is hard work,
And that's what it feels like while you're writing,
Then everything is just as it should be.
Your labor isn't a sign of defeat.
It's a sign of engagement.
The difference is all in your mind, but what a difference.

The difficulty of writing isn't a sign of failure.
It's simply the nature of the work itself.

For the writer, the word "flow" is a trap.
So is any word that suggests that writing is a spontaneous emission.
Writing doesn't flow unless you're plagiarizing or collecting cliches or enlisting volunteer sentences.

You'll experience certain kinds of suddenness as you work:
The illusion that time is passing quickly,
An episode of unusual mental clarity,
An almost unnoticed transition from one mood to another.

The piece you're working on may take a jump forward,
And you notice the jump instead of the hours and days of thinking that enabled it.
Everything may flow when you're setting thoughts down on paper.
But that's jotting, not writing.

"Flow" means effusion, a spontaneous outpouring of sentence.
But what it really, secretly means is easy writing.

The more you know about making sentences, the easier it is to fix them.
To get out of trouble, to find the really good sentences—
The better sentences—hiding beneath the skin of your thinking.
What matters isn't how fluidly the sentences are emitted.
Only how good they are.

It's easy to believe in "flow" if you can't feel the difference between a dead sentence and a living one.
Or see the ambiguities you're accidentally creating.

In other words, "flow" is often a synonym of ignorance and laziness.
It's a sign of haste, the urge to be done.

But the arguments kept revolving around the dash itself. People talked about it as if it were some uncanny eldritch rune that no self-respecting human would even think to deploy. “Nobody uses the em dash in their emails or text messages,” one commenter insisted. “This punctuation is irrelevant to everyday use-cases.”

Oceans of communication that used to be handled by speech are now left to lone individuals typing into the internet.

I am not writing this to defend dashes. I am writing this because I want to suggest that the phrase “everyday use-cases” signals a genuinely epochal shift in our perception of what writing even is.

Consider that, for a good stretch of recent history, most of the written material that people spent time with — the stuff beyond signs and menus — was full-on writing-writing: text that somebody sat down and composed, maybe revised or edited, maybe even had professionally printed. And this kind of communication was different from our daily interaction with our peers: You talked to your peers, mostly. Even after the internet arrived, this basic psychic arrangement persisted.

And now it does not — like, at all. “Emails or text messages,” posts and chats, DMs and comments, DoorDashers telling you the restaurant is out of coleslaw: Oceans of communication that used to be handled by speech are now left to lone individuals typing into the internet. Even if you remain a dedicated reader, you may still end up spending more of your time dealing in on-the-fly typings, because that has become the everyday use-case of writing.

This everyday language is still marvelous stuff — so playfully expressive that it’s even developed an equivalent of the dopey voice we use to mock bad ideas. (It’s tYpInG LiKe tHiS.) But writing-writing is a different thing, isn’t it? At its best, it captures a different register of ideas: less visceral and immediate, maybe, but often more distilled and deliberate, more elegantly engineered, choreographing the dance of thought with more precision and depth and, usually, punctuation.