Goodreads asked Joseph H. Wycoff:

How do you deal with writer’s block?

Joseph H. Wycoff I don't know that I have ever had writer's block. I wrote what I had to write for my education. I write what people pay me to write so that a corporation can sell more product to consumers or a college can put on a good show to "evidence" data-driven decision making for the accrediting agencies. And, I write things that occur to me as worth writing at my own discretion.

I suppose the question refers more generally to the latter kind of writing. In that case, I definitely have had reader's block. My master's committee chair once told me he would not tolerate postmodernism in a thesis written by one of his graduate students. lt took me six years to work through that reader's block! "Write what you know!" all the advice books tell me. Friends and family on the other hand become afflicted with reader's block when they think that some shameful secret may be revealed in my writings. Agents and publishers of course have exercised their professional responsibility for reader's block. It is hard to fault them for that. Most recently, when I sought a publisher for _Outsourcing Student Success_, the reviewer acknowledged the thoroughness of my archival research and the lacuna in higher education literature on my subject, but nonetheless wielded the power of reader's block because of the "tone" of my narrative. I purposefully set the story arc of the historical narrative as a tragedy, so perhaps the reviewer wanted to read a romantic, comedic or satirical historical narrative about institutional research and higher education. Ultimately, you know, reader's block is highly subjective.

That is a useful insight, I learned, because the only way to overcome reader's block is to distance oneself from the reader. I have reached a sufficient age now to have attained the appropriate level of social alienation from readers and intellectual disdain for reader's block that I could not let pass the opportunity to self-publish.

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