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What's a good way to get better at writing?
I kind of suck at it, and this is troubling me. I'm a working academic, and sitting on a growing cache of results that I can't get out because (outside of some unpredictable periods where the chemical stars in my brain align just right or something) I tend to stare down the same paragraph for two hours and finally squeeze out, word by painful word, something that sounds like the ramblings of a schizophrenic with aphasia, and then feel so drained that I will viscerally fear opening vim again for a week or two. "Professional issues" is an easy sell as far as evidence that something must be done goes, but even outside that, there are so many things - posts, stories, explanations - that I wish I could write but can't. The circumstance that every so often, this problem briefly just goes away and I can in fact vomit out several pages that do in fact hold up even if I look at them again later, just makes my problem all the more frustrating - it feels like it's not like there is something I just lack (and therefore could obtain, making the problem go away), but rather that the necessary circuitry is there but defective.
This is just a guess, but I think it sounds like you are struggling with perfectionism. Words enter your brain, and if they aren't "perfect" (or nearly so) on the first pass, you feel stress and discard them, which results in a feedback loop that leads to writer's block.
Conventional advice I've heard to address this is to just "word vomit" garbage onto the page. Once enough material flows through you, you'll be able to piece it back together into something that's okay.
In my personal experience, alcohol has helped, but I would recommend against that being a long term solution. In addition to being unhealthy, drugs can change the way you think enough to break feedback loops and mental traps.
It would be a fairly self-flattering explanation if this were the case, but while I can't quite rule out that the pattern you describe is accurate (and simply leads to the end result being as it is because of some sort of semantic saturation), it does seem like the results I wind up with if I force out the text in unproductive state really are that bad.
"Just because you are perfectionist doesn't mean that the thing isn't actually not good enough", or something?
Remind yourself that anything you do is just a first draft, so it's ok if it sucks.
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