No Such Thing, My Dears
My nose has turned into a spigot, my head hurts, my hips ache, my muscles are sore, my throat is on fire.
Yup. I’m sick. It had to happen–the workout I’ve been giving my immune system lately could only end in Bad Things. (I have even been listening to Patsy Cline and Hank Williams, like, nonstop. A cold was inevitable.) So today is a day for chicken soup with garlic, the bread I baked yesterday, slow moving around the house, and maybe getting out the telly so the kids are taken through their own Valley of Mucus with something to distract them.
On the one hand I am cranky, and on the other hand is a substantive post I promised earlier in the week. I suppose there is no getting around it. You ready? Onward, then.
There is no such thing as writer’s block.
It is my considered opinion that writer’s block does not exist. There is fear and laziness, but no huge bugaboo called “writer’s block” waiting to trip the unwary author. There is the crippling sense of having failed or the extreme fear of being hated for what one produces, both products of the Internal Censor, but “writer’s block”? It’s a f&%king fiction, my ducks.
If one says, “I have writer’s block” one is feted with cookies and tea, sympathy is poured out upon one’s head. One can nurse this for a great deal. You are an Artist in Pain, and you can milk it for all it’s worth. Writer’s block. Poor you.
If, on the other hand, we get a little closer to the truth and say, “I don’t feel like writing,” or “I’m frightened of what my mother will think of my writing” or even “I can’t handle this amount of rejection,” sympathy is in short supply.
There are a few reasons why one stops writing. The first and most insidious is fear. Fear of letting someone down or saying something one shouldn’t. Fear of rejection, or fear of being laughed at. Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of living, fear of dying, fear of the blank page, fear of the characters–there are so many things to be afraid of, and it is so hard to just gird one’s loins and wade in.
Fear serves a purpose. It tells us when we’re crossing a boundary or when our boundaries have been crossed. It tells us when we are in uncharted territory, when we’re doing something important, when we need to have all our eyes and ears alert.
But fear is also a crutch. It is an excuse not to stretch out, not to work, not to do something that may prove uncomfortable. It is an easy out.
The secondary reason is laziness. Writing is hard f&%king work, my friends, and do not let anyone tell you otherwise. It is a hard thankless task, even just physically. Typing sixty to ninety thousand words to finish a project (not counting revisions) is terrifically hard on the structures of the back, the wrists, the fingers. Then there’s the emotional cost of creating characters and mining your own experience for their responses. There’s the emotional cost of submissions and rejections. There’s the seesaw rollercoaster of editorial revisions. All of this takes a toll on the body and the soul, and renewal of either can get lost in the shuffle of daily life.
Any hard job needs to be begged off for a few days a year. Part of being a writer is the balance between the nose to the grindstone (butt in chair, fingers on keyboard) and the very real need to fill one’s soul-well so it doesn’t run dry. If the well runs dry you have the artistic version of vapor lock while the engine grinds away with no fuel to run it–but that is not “writer’s block”. That’s not taking care of yourself, and there is a difference.
Here is the reason why I know there is no such thing as “writer’s block”. You think you’re blocked? Fine. Sit down, and type or write longhand, “I can’t think of anything to write.”
Write it a hundred times.
Then write it another hundred.
If you don’t feel the urge to write something else, write it another hundred. Keep doing this until you get bored with rolling around in the dirt of self-pity and you start writing something new (or working on a current project.) Feel free to stop at any time in these hundred sentences to go work on something new.
This is not as cruel as it sounds. Sitting down and actually typing or writing is the best cure for any type of fear or laziness. Just the pure idiot motion of refusing to be done in by fear or laziness is, most of the time, all that is necessary.
Whenever I run a writing class I give my students the assignment to write three pages, longhand, in the morning. Getting up twenty minutes early and writing three pages of anything–whether it’s dreams, or complaints about having to get up, or what-have-you–is another good cure. It cleans out the sludge in the bottom of the mind and gets things moving again. My students often call them “torture pages”–and they work. They’re a good cure for artistic constipation. (Disclosure: This is straight out of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.) I don’t ever grade on these–for one thing, my students are adults. If they choose not to do this assignment, fine. But that’s beside the point.
Now for the important part.
Fear is okay. Laziness is okay. They are both valid responses to the kind of work a writer does. You just can’t wallow in them, that’s all.
Write this out in letters ten feet high and underline it in neon: It does not matter WHAT you write. It matters THAT you write, dammit. Just sitting down and producing every day is the important thing here. It is the habit, the discipline, that will carry you through the rough patches when the fear threatens to eat your soul and the laziness and loneliness threaten to finish off the rest of you. Just sitting down and doing it, no matter what, is the cure.
What, you thought there was a magic wand? F!!k no. There isn’t. There is only the work.
Here’s my pet theory of writing: quantity is important too. You keep writing, and you will be practicing your craft. Sooner or later you will come up with a submissible piece. Keep writing, and sooner or later you will come up with something well-written enough and fearless enough that someone will want to publish it. It’s what I call the “shotgun theory” of both publishing and writing. You keep practicing and practicing, refining your craft, doing it every day, and you will write something that someone, somewhere will want to publish.
Either that or you will find out writing’s not for you, which is okay too.
But that’s a different blog post…
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