Winning Strategies for Power Presentations: Jerry Weissman Delivers Lessons from the World’s Best Presenters

12. Writer’s Block

How to Break Through

Writer’s block is the proverbial stuff of legend and literature. A variation on the theme is Limitless, a Hollywood film starring Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. In it, Mr. Cooper plays a down-and-out writer who beats his severe case of writer’s block with a new drug that not only jump-starts his creative output, but gives him many other advanced mental capabilities. Of course, the story is fictional—A.O. Scott’s review of the film in the New York Times called it, “an energetic, enjoyably preposterous compound... a paranoid thriller blended with pseudo-neuro-science fiction and catalyzed by a jolting dose of satire”¹—but the situation is very real: Writers do run dry.

Mr. Scott went on to list the many ...