Writer's Block
Posted 8/3/01
When people say that writing cannot be taught, they mean that one cannot give another person vision. Judson Jerome in The Poet and the Poem.
Having spent a few weeks being creatively blocked, when I read the above quote, it really resonated. Writing is so much more than just laying out a story, essay, or poem. While it is important to know about syntax and where the commas go, vision is the secret leavening agent that makes writing powerful.
While shoe salesman describes what someone does, writer describes what someone is. It is about much more than the act of putting words on the page; it is about how one engages with life. Writer's block is merely a symptom that something deeper is not quite right. When we are unable to write anything that doesn't make us cringe, we are having a crisis of vision. Perhaps another way to say this is we are having a crisis of courage.
Just as non-orgasmic, non-involved people can copulate, people without a writer's courage and vision can plunk away at the keyboard and end up with sentences strung together in paragraphs. The result of non-involved writing is, however, flat, just like the result of non-involved sex. It does not touch us, does not make us feel or think. We cannot have really good sex without both at least a modicum of technical skill and the ability to give ourselves over to the act. No matter how "good" you are in bed, if you are detached and defended, the act will be less than it could be. If you are exclusively into your own experience, your lover will know. If you are distracted, your partner will feel your perfunctoriness. If you are lying, on one level or another, it will be perceived. If you are bored and forcing things, it will be a disaster; and if you don't know how to touch those tender parts, no matter the passion, it will be a fiasco. Not unlike writing, huh?
The best writing arises from a wellspring of inspiration. Sometimes it is just there. Other times we can access it through various writing practices. Trying to force it, however, is, in my experience, like trying to call forth a lush panoply of green from the desert. It doesn't happen.
Mediocre writers skim the surface. They may have good plots, but they seldom have good characters or settings that draw us in. When a writer is holding his or her material at arms length and writing "about" something from a safe distance, we know it. That is why I say to be a writer takes courage. Just because you write fiction or humor doesn't mean you don't expose yourself, for the good writer digs deep into the psyche, deep into the place where he or she engages with life and lends that richness of experience to the work. In a way, a writer of great fiction is like a method actor, able to crawl into the skin of each character as he walks it across the page. An accomplished writer or poet is a great student of human nature and of life. Writers nourish themselves with details overlooked by others.
Writer's block is what happens when we get cut off from those inner depths. It is a kink in the energy, the symptom of a disconnect from some aspect of ourselves. That is why the recommendation is to leave the writing alone, to get out in life and, essentially, repair our relationship with it. I can't tell you how many articles and poems I've tried to write during this dry period. I wanted to keep posting a new article every week, just as I wanted to write poetry. There have been long stretches when I wrote a poem every single day, but for the last few weeks, everything that showed up on my page was trite and lacking in soul. I wasn't in it. I couldn't get close enough, and the words that came out were hackneyed. I wrote out of a sense of needing to write, rather than a sense of needing to say something. In actual experience, everything it seemed I might say bored me. Although I didn't know it, what I needed to say, I was avoiding.
I think when you experience writer's block, you will see writing is not the only place where your energy is jammed up. In any event, this is true for me. The stuckness I felt in my life, translated into stuckness on the page. I finally croaked out two poems, both of them about not being able to write; but essentially, I was in a space where I momentarily lacked the emotional courage to penetrate what was truly going on with me. Even when I had things I wanted to write about, I couldn't make them viable. I could do nothing but sit with it until I became unstuck and the energy began to flow again.
What I learned from all this is that certain things inhibit vision. For me, this often involves having situations in my life in which I cannot be honest with myself. The need to perform in one area, easily translates into the need to perform on the page, which in turn, translates into self-conscious crapolla. It is often a very subtle sort of dishonesty, not something I am aware of at all. For a long time, I dealt with it by trying to fix the writing. Now I see that the inability to write is a sign that I need to fix something in my life.
Anybody else got anything to say about this?
