“What if…?” The Thing Blocking Your Daily Writing Has a Different Name

A wrong reviewer gives overwhelmingly underwhelming feedback

Claire came to me with a journal problem.

A paper she'd spent years developing — a term she had coined herself, a framework built from two decades of clinical practice — had been rejected. The reviewer's feedback was overwhelmingly underwhelming. One sentence about weak writing. A question about where her argument was. Nothing about the epistemology (hers was hardly conventional), nothing about the twenty years behind it. She'd been assigned to someone who reviewed from a brain-based paradigm. She was writing from a Post-Freudian one. The mismatch wasn't her fault. But it was her problem. And now mine.

So she came in asking about journal selection.

She also told me, privately, that she hadn't wanted to argue anything. She was making a claim, she said. A contribution. The word "argument" felt adversarial in a way that didn't fit what she was trying to do.

She did have an argument. A real one. She just didn't recognize it wearing that particular armor.

I listened. And then I asked her something else.

Because here's what I've learned after years of working with researchers: the problem they describe when they walk in (or, more commonly, join the Zoom call) is almost never the problem. They aren't wrong, exactly. I mean, what they describe is usually a problem. But it's rarely the problem. What they carry in to show me is the thing they can name: the wrong reviewer, ADHD brain, confusing stylistic transitions, claims they can't write linearly. Underneath it, though, as they describe in angstful detail this named problem, is usually something they don't yet have words for.

Something they haven't yet been given permission to claim.

Something they're not sure anyone would take seriously if they did.

And that's exactly when I ask, 'What if…?'

A neurodivergent brain finds deadlines essential and excruciating

Kiran came in with a tenure clock and eighteen months to produce two peer-reviewed papers. They’d spent their early career in an institution where publishing wasn't required. Now it was. They had the data. They had the research. They had, they told me, ADHD — which made deadlines both essential and excruciating.

They also had a day structured entirely around everything except writing.

This is not a Kiran problem. The academic day is an almost perfectly engineered environment for not writing. Every other task has a boundary: a meeting ends, an email sends, a lecture finishes. Each one delivers a small, clean sense of completion. Writing delivers nothing until you arbitrarily decide it’s ready to be submitted. And even after that, the best-case scenario is that a reviewer sends it back with detailed comments on all the minutiae that require revision.

So the writing moves to tomorrow. Tomorrow is already full — and if you've ever wondered why don't you just write, the answer is more structural than personal. This is the cycle Kiran described, and I hear some version of it in almost every first conversation I have.

ADHD is real. I see the struggle. But when I asked Kiran what their day actually looked like — hour by hour — what emerged was less a neurological pattern and more a structural one. The writing wasn't getting done because the system had given it no protected place to exist. Not because they couldn't do it. Because nothing in their environment was built to help them start.

That's a different problem. It has different solutions.

So I asked them, ‘What if…?’

A trusted colleague says his writing is confusing

Daniel had already done the hard part.

A 130-page manuscript on aging and social exclusion, under contract with a major university press, two successful rounds of peer review. Years of research, an argument he believed in, a voice that was — when he let it be — genuinely his.

Then he asked a colleague he respected to review the introduction one last time before a final submission. The colleague accepted.

Then the colleague came back and said it was confusing. Hard to follow. The personal storytelling and the academic theory weren't connecting. The feedback was harsher than that, actually. It didn't do much to mask the frustration behind it.

So Daniel found me. He came in asking about language. As a non-native English speaker, his biggest fear — that his English wasn't good enough — seemed, finally, to be confirmed.

What I read in the manuscript wasn't a language problem. The content was there. The thinking was there. He’d successfully navigated two rounds of peer review! He was so close to the finish line…but, what was missing were the transitions — not between paragraphs, but between registers. As he moved from personal narrative to academic analysis and back, he treated the seam as something to hide rather than something to write. Every time his own voice emerged — his interpretive lens — he pulled back from it. As if he didn't trust his own authority. As if he trusted his readers more than himself to make evaluative leaps. In his fear of overstepping his data, he had stopped short of telling the reader what his study actually meant.

That's not an English problem. It's not even a writing problem.

So I asked him, 'What if…?'

‘I can’t write linearly…’ said the iterative design thinker

Amara had been running a successful student program at a major university for a decade. Design thinking. Identity development. Helping students figure out who they were and what they wanted to do with it. She knew how to work with complexity. She knew how to hold ambiguity long enough for something useful to emerge.

She was also writing a book. A guide for neurodivergent youth, built around the same design thinking principles she'd been using professionally for years. She had stories. She had tools. She had, she told me, a problem: she couldn't write linearly. Chapter by chapter wasn't working. She'd start, get stuck, abandon it, start again somewhere else.

She said this like a confession.

I didn't hear a problem. I heard someone describe, with some precision, exactly how design thinking actually works — and then apologize for it. The iterative process she'd been teaching students for ten years was the same process she was resisting in writing the book. It wasn't failing her. She just didn't recognize it as writing because it didn't look like what she thought writing was supposed to look like.

Nobody had told her those were the same thing. (If this resonates, I wrote about an iterative approach to writing a journal paper.) 

The goalpost wasn't a chapter she couldn't finish. It was a model of writing she'd absorbed somewhere — linear, sequential, one section following the next in orderly succession — that had nothing to do with how she actually thought. She kept moving the start line because she kept trying to begin in a way that didn't fit her.

So I asked her, 'What if…?'

'What if…?'

Claire’s paper wasn't weak. Her framework was rigorous, her clinical experience genuinely original, and her argument was evident. What the reviewer couldn't locate — and what she couldn't yet see — was that the container didn't fit the content. The thinking was there. The structure that would make it legible to a journal reader wasn't. 

So I asked her: What if...you didn't have to choose between writing in the fluid, narrative style that feels natural to you and getting published? What if the pieces are already there, and what's missing is the repackaging?

Kiran’s day was full before they sat down to write. Every task they’d already completed had a boundary: a beginning, a middle, an end. Writing had none of that. It asked them to produce something from nothing, with no guaranteed return, on a timeline they’d set themself. Of course it moved to tomorrow. Tomorrow, at least, had a deadline attached to something else. I ask them: What if...a paper is just a series of tasks? Which paper task can you tackle today?

Daniel had earned his authority on every page of his manuscript. But somewhere in his training he had learned to treat his own interpretive voice as editorial overreach — something to be reined in, not developed. He kept stepping back from his own conclusions. The reader kept losing him. I ask him: What if...you just write one sentence in each transition seam that tells us exactly what you think we are supposed to 'get' at this point? What if...you don't trust your reader to make the same conclusion as you? What if you just tell them?

Amara had been working iteratively for a decade. She just didn't know that's what writing could look like too. I asked her: What if...you just start by writing the sections that call to you? What if you worry about piecing it together later?

None of them came in knowing how to respond to my questions. Why would they? They pointed at the thing they could name. What was underneath was the thing nobody has asked about yet.

Each of them felt stuck. Stuck because of a wrong reviewer, stuck because of ADHD, stuck because of a language barrier, stuck because of rigid writing rules. But I pushed back and asked, ‘What if it’s not that…what if getting you unstuck requires a different problem to solve?’

That's the question I'm always trying to get to. Not what was hard — most people can answer that. But what was underneath the hard. What hadn't yet been named. What they came in carrying but didn't think to put on the table because they weren't sure it counted as a writing problem.

It almost always counts.

I don't ask ‘What if…?’ because I know the answer. I ask it because they usually do.

What are you not naming when you name the thing?

Most researchers who come to me think they have one of three problems.

They think they don't have enough time. The writing keeps getting pushed because everything else has a deadline and the paper doesn't — or the deadline is real but distant enough to ignore until it isn't. They think they're not ready. One more paper to read, one more analysis to run, one more thing to clarify before they can actually begin. Or they think their writing isn't good enough. The sentences are wrong, the English is wrong, the structure is wrong, something is wrong and it's probably them.

These are real frustrations. These are real problems.

But in my experience they are almost never the problem. Underneath the time problem is usually a structural one: a day that was never built to protect writing, and a task that offers no immediate reward for the hour you give it. Underneath the readiness problem is usually a conceptual one: a model of writing as transcription rather than thinking, which means you can never have enough material because you're waiting to be finished thinking before you start. Is there an academic who has ever finished thinking? Underneath the language or writing problem is almost always an authority problem: a researcher who has learned, somewhere along the way, to treat their own voice as a liability on the page. Sometimes it shows up as early as the first sentence. 

The hurdles between us and the page are numerous. More often than not, they are simply indicators pointing toward something deeper. It's rarely the thing itself.

So if you recognize yourself in any of this — the wrong reviewer, the ADHD brain, the confusing transitions, the inability to write linearly — I'd ask you the same thing I asked Claure and Kiran and Daniel and Amara.

What if...it's not that?

If you're not sure what’s keeping you stuck, that's exactly what our first conversation is for. Book a free 30-minute call. We'll find a name for it and figure out your next step.

No agenda other than that.

Book a free 30-minute call here.

Footnotes

Don’t forget to check out my new video this month on predatory journals.

You can find it in the Publish It! Library 

Or watch on the Publish It! YouTube channel. I upload new content monthly so subscribe if you are interested!

If you are ready to Draft It! check out The Essential 10-Week Workshop – a self-paced course with tutorials, community discussion board, and workbook designed to guide you in preparing your first draft in 10 weeks for submission to a peer reviewed journal!  

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