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 The Dreaded Writer's Block
On a writers' email list, someone asked:
>HOW do I get over this D*&% writer's block? It's not that
I replied:
Sometimes I find it helpful to know why I'm stuck, because that can suggest the most appropriate remedy. I'm not sure of the wisdom of this, but it usually works for me.
There are times when I write and write and write and just burn out. No moderation. Usually this happens when I'm really excited about what I'm writing and the creative fire is blazing away - and suddenly burns out. If that is what is wrong, a few days of doing other things (not housework, but *fun* things) usually gets the fires burning again. Recreation = Re-creation. This one is especially likely when we can't write anything.
OR sometimes I'm trying to write the "wrong" thing. That is, there is something that I need to write (or perhaps just think about, but I tend to think better with my fingers on a keyboard), and I am not looking at it (maybe even am pretending that I don't know that its even there). It's like a cork stuck down in a bottleneck, and nothing else can get out until it is out of the way. What usually works for me then is to just start typing in my thoughts - no matter how irrelevant, no matter how incomplete. I might even start with something like, "I should be doing the dishes. Yuk. Who am I kidding - I loathe doing the dishes..." I just keep doing that until something happens and I get unstuck. Or I catch up on my forever-behind correspondence - and often somewhere in that, I find out what the block is.
OR I'm trying to rush something. It hasn't finished simmering in the back of my brain, and needs to be left alone until it begins to "set", like bramble jelly. It's best then to do or write something else for a while. Patience is not my strong suit, but sometimes it is the only thing that works.
OR I've told myself that I "ought" to write something I'm really not interested in. I don't know why I do this - well, actually, there are several reasons - but it never works. I have to be fired up about something to do more than a few paragraphs with it. If I really must do this boring thing, I need to do it on the reward system. I promise myself something - a little holiday, a present of something I've been wanting but felt I shouldn't "waste" the money on, whatever turns me on enough to get me through this. Some people might say that I "ought" to be more self-disciplined. That's their problem - I don't believe in unnecessary suffering. There are plenty of thing in my life to practice self-discipline on already - meditation, exercise, and those dratted dishes, for example.
OR I might be frightened at the size and complexity of the project. I only write little things. Even when I write a book, I only do it in tiny pieces, one bit and then another, almost at random. If I tell myself that I am going to write a very long piece, and make an outline to do it properly, it just paralyzes my tiny mind. If I tell myself that I'm just making notes, then eventually I can just string them together and they turn themselves into a book.
In fact, the book nearest done at the moment was written to avoid doing the one the publisher thought he wanted. I couldn't think how to structure his one (still can't), and every time I sat down to work on it I did this resistance/displacement thing of "making more notes for class" on another subject. Then the next time I started to teach the class, I found I had 186 single spaced pages of "notes", practically a book. So surprising - I wasn't going to write that book just now. Basically, I suppose what I'm saying is that I sometimes scare myself by seeing this big intimidating thing ahead of me, and I have to find a way to make it small enough for me to think about without terror.
OR, speaking of terror, it could be that I'm just plain scared. What if this is really good? That would change my life - do I want that? What if this is a total failure? Could I bear that when this subject matters so much to me? What if people read this and see who I really am? And they don't like/approve of me? Or what if they like me too much? These are all silly questions, yes? Lurking in the unconscious, they are powerful and intimidating, but when we get them out into the light of consciousness, they just look absurd. Then we can say, "OK, I have this silly fear, but I can just go ahead and write anyway." Courage is, as we all know, not a lack of fear, but a choice to experience the fear and go on anyway. I suppose we could always lie to ourselves and say that we are never going to show it to anyone anyway, but that is probably best avoided. Reality is hard enough to see anyway, without deliberately messing it up.
I don't know if any of this is helpful to anyone else, but it is what works for me.
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