Goodreads asked George W. Kaufman:

How do you deal with writer’s block?

George W. Kaufman I find that writing comes and goes for me in spurts. There are lots of dry wells, some wells that are productive but not outstanding, and occasionally a gusher. It’s made me wonder what goes awry when my writing loses its rhythm. It is helpful for a writer to have a facility with words, but without fresh ideas and new directions, writing won’t achieve its full potential.

When I teach, I tell my students they need to commit to spend some time writing each day, even before their ideas have teased themselves into a familiar form. I provide exercises that make that instruction less formidable. When participants resist diving into a series of ten minute writing exercises, they are expressing a limiting self-belief that sounds like “I have nothing worthwhile to say, nothing worthwhile to write.” When I hear that form of resistance I recognize that a larger issue is at play. And that issue is one to which I also fall prey. When I am out of fresh ideas with my own writing, it means I haven’t been paying attention to life around me. I have missed a signal, misunderstood a gesture, ignored a warning, or been oblivious to a signpost. Relationships feel static instead of dynamic. I am in the picture but not aware of the other images.

If you were to pick out highlights from the past week, what would come to mind? I want to know what happened in one of the recent yesterdays that involved you, or you noticed or observed, or that held you in its grasp because it was totally true. I want to know how you tracked emotions, observed responses, followed behavior. How did you know when responses were spontaneous or planned, unvarnished or edited?

We want to be moved by world issues, and we want the experiences we encounter in our world to lift the hem line of life and show us more leg, reveal more life issues, and take us on a musical pathway by which we can touch on issues larger than ourselves. We want to be held in the thrall of humanity’s fight for life, for lending our shoulder to stones that need to be rolled away, and to smooth the journey for someone else – not because we need to, but because we want to – not because we should but because we can. If w achieve those goals, we can use the information learned from our encounter with writer’s block to work for us – not against us.

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