Writer's block, an owner's guide: Definition of writer’s block
This may or may not seem like a big or groundbreaking thing to everyone but it’s my moment of epiphany, my scientific breakthrough. Let me tell you.
A year and a half after starting to write this, two years and a half after starting to work on the question, and in the course of working on my third research project in the area, I finally have a theory of what writer’s block might actually be. And guess what, regular readers won’t be surprised to know that it came to me in the language of reversal theory.
When we first have the idea of a big project - a screenplay, a marathon, a marriage - we are in the paratelic state. The thing seems worth doing for its own sake. It seems like fun. I’ll write a novel and it will be fun. I’ll climb a mountain because it’ll be rewarding. I know it means some effort, but that doesn’t matter.
When you’re actually doing the work, it’s fun some of the time but most of it is done in the telic state. You have to sit at the desk and write (or you don’t have to - you can use one of your excuses, or just pretend to be letting the story simmer at the back of your mind - and behold, there’s your writer’s block). You have to keep running when your legs hurt and breathing hurts and nobody you know is even watching. You have to live with this person’s moods and opinions day after day even though she hangs the toilet paper the wrong way round. You are in the telic state - you do the thing because it will pay off later, same as when you go out to work.
And I’m suggesting that this is what writer’s block is. It’s not that you are in the “wrong” state. If you switched from telic to paratelic at this moment, it would be the signal to goof off and do something that was really fun. No, writer’s block is the tension between two parts of you - the part that created the decision to tackle this big task, and the other part that gets stuck with the actual work. You can see how each of them might resent the attitude of the other. How they might be critical of each other. Writer’s block is that internal argument.
(This is all metaphor, I’m not saying you are two people, ok?)
But this is my best answer so far to the question “why is it that we want to do things and yet we don’t do them?”
And the cure? The cure is not reversal. The cure, I guess, is reconciliation. And what that means is that the cure is not just a matter of adapting existing reversal-based methods of therapy (such as the use of reversal in sports psychology). The cure is… [to be continued]
Published on January 11, 2006 at 12:46 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/definition-of-writers-block.html
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