A Taxonomy of Writer’s Block: The Good, The Bad, and The Necessary

 

 

By

Robin Black

 

When I started writing, at the age of thirty-nine, after twenty years of doing so only occasionally then giving up, I suffered from whatever we call the opposite of writer’s block. I couldn’t stop writing. It was very much as if a lid had been blown off a pot of boiling water – or boiling words, a sentence soup – and it was spilling, spilling, spilling. My husband and I would go out for dinner and often he would recognize that my thoughts had drifted, and would ask, You’re writing aren’t you? And the answer was always a sheepish Yes. The hours when my children were at school flew by. The weekends when I could not just sit alone in a room stewing over imaginary people and their imaginary problems seemed endless.

And I didn’t believe that would ever change.

But over the years it has changed; and in more than one way; and for more than one reason. Since I know I’m not the only one to go through non-writing periods, I thought I would share a very brief taxonomy of those times in my own life, along with my understanding of what distinguishes each, when and how to fight the silence, and when to just – as they say – let it be. These categories may not correspond to your experiences, but maybe they’ll help someone out there who is feeling a little empty or frustrated right now.

The Pause Before The Leap Forward

I’m starting with this because it’s my favorite kind of so-called writer’s block – if that isn’t too much of an oxymoronic concept. Here’s how it goes: I have ideas for what I want to write, but then, when I sit down to write, I feel like I can’t find an inroad. I get tangled up immediately in questions of point of view, good starting places, structure – tangled up sooner than it makes sense to be. It’s as though I have forgotten everything I have ever learned, or as though I don’t know how to handle what craft knowledge I have. Yet the idea persists, as does the desire.

And, though I hate the feelings that go with that clash of desire and ability, I almost always love the experience in retrospect, because it so often means that once that tangled feeling fades, I find myself better at some aspect of writing than I was before. I understand something more clearly, or, without consciously understanding anything differently, I find myself doing things in new ways, to better effect. The sense of blockage was a plateau, but not a shut door of any kind.

The key here, the way to see this for what it is, is that the idea for the piece and the desire to write it don’t fade. The execution feels a little challenging, maybe daunting, in a technical way. But this can be a productive and important pause in your work, as you learn how to do things you couldn’t do before. As opposed to . . .

The Longer Pause When You Feel Like You Should Be Writing and You Want to Write but You Are Drawing a Complete Blank

This one is the pits. This is the worst. Let me say that more clearly: This is bad. And this is the one where I always suspect that some non-craft-related inhibitor is getting in the way. It could be self-consciousness, or fear of failure – or for that matter fear of success. It could be that some vestigial internalized taboo is at work. In my experience, this kind of “I want to write but have nothing to write” sensation almost always has more to do with psychology than with anything about writing skills – to the extent that it makes sense to separate those strands.

Through the years, I have found myself at this point because I have frozen in the face of a contract I was afraid I couldn’t fulfill; because I was afraid of discovering that no one would ever publish a word I wrote; because I was afraid people close to me would disapprove of what I had to say; because I had been burned by a rejection; because I was afraid people would think my fiction was autobiographical – and on and on and on.

In each of those cases what has helped me is figuring out what the underlying worry is and trying to deal with that – as opposed to making myself sit at the keyboard and bang my head against it. Other things that have helped have been writing about something silly for a time, something to which I have no real emotional commitment. That experience can become a reminder of why you write in the first place, why it’s a pleasure to put words on a page, and it can reinforce your connection to writing, a security you can bring back to the more serious projects when you return.

When I believe the blockage comes from a fear of being “no good at writing” I’ll often write a few poems – all of which are terrible and all of which I have known from the start were going to be terrible. Again, there’s something about reestablishing a connection to written language with no pressure to do so skillfully that can be extremely liberating.

I will also sometimes forbid myself to write for more than five minutes a day for a while, a sort of tantric approach, building the desire to do so until, instead of it feeling like something I should do but can’t, it feels like something I’m not allowed to do but must.

This insidious, psychological sort of blockage is what kept me silent for so many years, through my twenties,through my thirties, despite how very much I wanted to write. I understand now what subconscious forces were at work. I only wish I had understood my own demons better then.

The Season When The Well Is Empty And You Simply Need To Take A Break

I suppose there are people who want to write all the time. I’m not one of them. It hasn’t happened often, but it has happened occasionally that I just have nothing much to say. Or maybe it’s more accurate to put it this way: I have said enough for the time. My imagination –necessary even to nonfiction – has no new fodder. I’m not really blocked, because I’m not interested in writing. And I’m not about to make any great leaps in ability, it seems, because there isn’t something I’m trying to do but haven’t yet learned how to do. I’m just out of material and also, maybe sated in some sense. Or, to put it less optimistically, maybe spent. But this is okay, though disconcerting – disconcerting, because it’s one thing to feel like you don’t know how to write what you want you to write, or even that you want to write but can’t think of what to write, but it’s a different and potentially more frightening thing to feel like you may not even ever want to write again.

But I’m convinced that for many of us this is normal too. Even inevitable. No panic necessary. Once you are a writer, the overwhelming odds are that you will always be a writer – even if not one who wants to write on every day or even every year.

Having very recently finished writing a novel, I am in such a period now. And here is what I plan to do. I plan to take a month – or two – off and paint pictures, cook elaborate meals, finish choosing tile for my home. I plan to take care of a relative who is facing surgery. I plan to throw my creative energies – including those involved in caregiving – into projects having nothing to with words on the page. And I plan not to panic about whether or not I’ll ever feel like writing again, much less be unable to concentrate on doing anything else.

Because it makes sense, doesn’t it?

It took me nearly four decades to build up all that pressure, all that strange urgency about expressing myself with these little black words, on that big blank sheet of paper, urgency about creating and conveying the lives of people who don’t themselves exist. Surely it’s not too much to give myself another few weeks now to return to that peculiar state.

Let the simmering begin.

I will see you back on this blog in the fall. Have a wonderful summer –  in which you write or do not write; but in which you understand your own process enough not to panic when it shows signs of changing, and know your demons well enough to fight them, and recognize your possible need to take a break.