Writer's block, an owner's guide: Bath, bed and bus

You can’t always cudgel your brain to come up with a good idea. Some gestation time is essential.

I’d promised my coach (yes, I don’t just sell coaching, I also believe in it) that I would write a particular proposal by yesterday afternoon. I wrote and wrote and I had 50% more words than I’d planned. But I never got to the point, because I didn’t know exactly what my point was. And I stopped and left it. I knew that my brain was working on the challenge and the answer would pop up when it was ready.

Away from writing, there are lots of stories about creativity happening by itself when you have been working hard on a problem and then take a break. The best known story is the one about Kekule dreaming the structure of the benzene molecule. Here are some other dreams. And then there’s Poincare revolutionizing geometry as he stepped onto a bus. Here’s a complete description of that.

Bertrand Russell said it: “It appeared that after first contemplating a book on some subject, and after giving serious preliminary attention to it, I needed a period of subconscious incubation which could not be hurried and was if anything impeded by deliberate thinking.”

Now if people don’t know this, they’re gonna feel bad about not knowing what to write, and they might make the mistake of calling it “writer’s block.” This is not block. This is something writers do. This is writing.

By the way, my title comes from this article by Shane Magee.

Published on November 4, 2006 at 10:58 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/bath-bed-and-bus.html