Oh, the horror. Your paper is due tomorrow, and for the jillionth time you have sat down at the keyboard in hopes of jumpstarting that tree sloth of a brain. But no. Your brain just hangs there, chewing on a leaf.

Personally, I think “writer’s block” is a misnomer. While it may feel like a block, technically it’s more of a swamp. A mire. A slough of despond. Your temporary inability to write may stem from a whole variety of causes—performance anxiety, imposter’s syndrome, distraction, a sudden awareness that you have no clue what you’re talking about—along with a whole host of brilliant excuses having to do with software or Netflix or your alarming love life.

Here are a few techniques you can use to get that sloth brain out of the mud and climbing to beautiful heights. I believe they work whether you’re a student or a professional writer.

1. Remember, your block is temporary.

Whatever you do, avoid looking up “famous writers with writer’s block.” You will find extreme examples of literary giants (Haroldå Brodkey, Harper Lee, Henry Roth, Ralph Ellison, George R.R. fricking Martin) doing bupkis for years, even decades. But come on. Most of us aren’t writing the next Song of Ice and Fire or To Kill a Mockingbird. There is not quite as much at stake. You’ll get past this.

2. When you have trouble writing, stop writing.

Writing is not a bowel movement. You don’t sit down and get instant results. And writer’s block is nothing like constipation. Writing is thinking, and you need sufficient time to think. If you have the time (and aren’t, say, doing a timed AP exam), go over the assignment or your initial idea again and again. Let the project settle happily into your brain. Most of the writers I admire, including Neil Gaiman, Hilary Mantel, and Ernest Hemingway, have given their ideas time to percolate. We’re taught in school to come up with rapid-fire answers to questions—a neat skill, certainly. But this is a terrible way to think over the long run. Why? Because creative thinking needs the long run. Let your unconscious brain carry its weight for once.

3. Visit the Owl of Minerva.

The goddess of wisdom “flies at dusk,” wrote the philosopher Hegel. He meant that your best thinking does not happen during the day, when you’re barraged with distractions. These days, though, the Owl of Minerva tends to hide far into the night, when social media and texting fill the air with white noise.

Try this instead: go to bed ridiculously early. Devices entirely off. Earplugs in if necessary. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb after eight o’clock. Then I listen to audiobooks—the more boring the better—until I’m sleepy. Set an alarm for 4:30 a.m. Yes, you are throwing your biological clock out the window. But the secret of some of the best writers is their ability to sit still, and some of us can only sit still when we’re practically catatonic. I get up at 4:30 seven days a week and start writing after my first cup of coffee. (I began writing this at 4:40 a.m.) Besides preventing distractions—who in her right mind is up at this hour?—you can tap into your unconscious brain more readily when you’re, you know, unconscious.

4. Try the Comet Method.

That’s what I call the outlining technique I use for much of my writing. If you think outlining is for weenies, think again. You should outline even shorter pieces, even in a timed exam. An outline is a plan, and everything needs a plan.

My Comet outline starts with a “lede,” a beginning. This is where you make your main points, or introduce the action, or set the scene. Don’t try to write the entire paper or essay or story. Just work on the lede. One or two paragraphs. Rewrite it two, three, ten times until it seems pretty good. Now you’re ready to write the end, just one paragraph or even one sentence. Skip the middle entirely. Once you get the beginning and end right, you’re ready to outline the middle. Not write the middle. Outline. I use Microsoft Word’s outline view. It drives me crazy but it works.

Why do I call this method the Comet? Because it has a bright head that tails off into a glittering outline. Once you have a Comet, you can fill in the outline with your first draft. You’re not writing so much as following your own instructions.

5. Then there’s the Pith, or Chase the Ball, Method.

I use this occasionally for shorter pieces, especially when I’m making an argument. This time, don’t try to write at all. Just take notes. Jot down exactly the point you want to make. Write the pith, the hard seed that will form the core of your peach of a paper. Limit yourself to 40 words, about what would require one human breath to read aloud. (The ancient Greeks, who believed that our brain follows the patterns of the rest of the body, called this a “period.” The length of a breath equals the length of a thought.) Once you have your pith, your nugget of an argument, chase it. Write down your proofs, tell a story if you have one; do everything that defends your pith.

If this method seems clumsy, fine. Just work on a pith, then ignore it and write your paper. You will find that your unconscious has already lifted your brain out of the mud.

6. Write badly.

The biggest mistake a beginning writer can make is to try to write well in the mistaken belief that the first draft has to be perfect. Good writing is rewriting. The best writers are really good editors. My books, which average 80,000 to 100,000 words, go through at least a dozen drafts. The first drafts tend to be horrible. The good news is, nobody but me (and sometimes my long-suffering wife) see them.

If you possibly can, take a day or two between your first and second drafts. If you don’t have that kind of time, try this: write a horrible first draft, then delete it entirely and start over. The second draft will almost certainly be better than if you simply edited the original document. Back in the dawn of word processing, I wrote a 3,000 word story for a magazine, polished it up, and then poof! It disappeared into the ether. Completely gone. I frantically rewrote the thing to make the deadline. And it was better than the one I had lost. Why? Probably because the more forgettable sentences were simply forgotten, replaced by better thoughts served up by my unconscious.

In sum…

Writing is thinking. Some of your best thinking gets done by your unconscious. Take whatever time you can. Think as soon as you get the assignment or an idea. Procrastinate for a bit. Work on the idea, not the words. Let yourself write badly. Then rewrite and rewrite until it’s perfect or, more likely, you have run out of time. Congratulations. You have become an unblocked, if sleep deprived, writer.

Jay Heinrichs is the New York Times bestselling author of Thank You for Arguing, Word Hero, and How to Argue with a Cat. He served as the editor or editorial director of more than a dozen magazines, and has published hundreds of pieces under deadline. You can find him at jayheinrichs.com and ArgueLab.com. He has declared his own time zone, which he calls Jaylight Savings. It has ruined his social life.