Writer's block, an owner's guide: The romance of block

Another fragment. Again in rather stuffy language. Sorry, too busy writing to stop and edit.

It was in the Romantic period that difficulty with writing began to be widely reported.

Not everything that is offered as evidence of difficulty in creating can be accepted as evidence of what we think of as block. For example, Storr gives George Sand’s description of Chopin as “shutting himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating and altering a bar a hundred times, spending six weeks over a single page,” as evidence that he found creation very difficult. But the quotation is out of context. In the same passage Sand had just explained that “his creation was spontaneous and miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without foreseeing it. It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to play it to himself” and that the subsequent difficulties were in accurately transcribing his creation - difficulties indeed, but far from what we usually describe as blocking.

Similarly, the number of alterations seen in the manuscripts of great creators is not necessarily evidence of their torment as is sometimes suggested. It is evidence that they were working: evidence, in fact, that they were creators. Niecks mentions Beethoven’s sketch-books, Balzac’s proof-sheets and Pope’s, Milton’s and Goethe’s manuscripts as showing the amount of effort routinely required to produce the greatest work. This seems a much more realistic view of the documents, for after all few creators are satisfied by their first drafts. Niecks adds that those great creators, such as Mozart, whose first drafts do need little revision, perform comparable amounts of work but do it before setting pen to paper.

Again, the Romantic fashion for preserving and even publishing “fragments” as though they were complete works is far from being proof of blockage. In Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and others it is proof of productivity in excess of what was already a sufficient body of great work to make them immortal. As Leader says - arguing a case opposite to mine - “what is noteworthy here is less the fact of incompletion than the age’s implied acceptance of it, even the celebration of it”. In the present age, it is not unlikely that prolific writers generate the same quantity of unfinished work, but receive less encouragement to publicize the fact.

And so - as a psychologist and writer unlearned in composition studies - I question whether blocking, as we understand it, is as much a defining feature of the Romantic view of creativity as is often suggested. I do suggest that the various difficulties reported by the successful and productive writers of that age may have brought into the public mind a less complex and rather different possibility - the possibility that one could be a “writer” while failing to produce publishable text. And I suggest that this led to the popularity of block as an explanation of such failure.

I suggest further that our belief in block, as an acceptable excuse for silence, has the effect of reducing the need or pressure for actual writing, leading to a reduction in productivity which validates and reinforces our belief in block. And so on. So like I’ve been hinting here in more tentative language since 2004: once we know that block is a fiction, what choice have we but to stop doing it?

Published on October 24, 2006 at 5:26 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/the-romance-of-block.html

1 Comment

Absolutely. “I’m suffering writer’s block,” just sounds so dramatic. Would we be so quick to announce it as our excuse if we referred to it as “mental constipation” or something? I’ve always thought that there was no such thing as “writer’s block.” There is:

- I have nothing to say right now, even though I have the urge to say nothing, brilliantly.
- My mind’s too cluttered with work, family, and other things; I just can’t think straight when it comes to fiction.
- I don’t feel like writing at the moment, but I feel like I SHOULD feel like writing.

“Writer’s block” is convenient shorthand, so long as we don’t glorify the notion that it’s some tragic disease we writers suffer that needs a miraculous cure. Sometimes the cure is simple “apply butt to chair and start writing” discipline. The resulting text may start out dull and lifeless, but if we plod along diligently, the brain will get bored with dull and lifeless and eventually insist on spicing things up just because it’s conceded defeat and needs to entertain itself. (I think. I guess it depends on how stubborn we are with ourselves, but it seems to me that “block” is a sort of mental temper tantrum against doing what we feel we “ought” to do.)

One of my favorite cures for these states is to sneak up on it and direct attention away from it - to pretend, “Okay, I’m not going to write now.” I grab my camera and indulge in a little visual creativity, or to play with Paint Shop Pro and turn my photos into “art.” I’m no photographer or artist - I actually do make my living writing. Which is part of the problem; I’m always skating on the thin edge of burn-out. Enough is enough, sometimes - even “fun” writing looks like a chore. But other art forms (including creating scrapbooks and “altered” art) give me creative outlets and remove some of that stressful “Oh, God, I think I’ve lost it!” thinking. And then, I can get back to writing, without feeling “creatively constipated.”

Another thing that helps is to write TO someone, even if it’s “the anonymous readers of my blog.” For some reason, writing in a vacuum, to nobody but me, feels silly. (Mental masturbation, anyone?) Oddly enough, that’s when the inner critic rears her ugly head. Writing TO someone feels as natural as writing an email, and doesn’t get all caught up in formality and sentence structure and the notion of “perfect” prose. It just has to communicate - to get the idea from my brain to your brain.

Comment by hollyjahangiri — October 31, 2006 @ 9:59 am

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