Writer's block, an owner's guide: Writer’s block is caused by print

Walter Ong wrote about the differences between (primitive) oral culture and (our) print culture. He said print encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text is complete and final. Print “suggest[s] self-containment. Print encloses thought in thousands of copies of a work of exactly the same visual and physical consistency”. Print culture, because of the self-contained nature of the printed text, “gave birth to the romantic notions of ‘originality’ and ‘creativity’, which set apart an individual work from other works even more, seeing its origins and meaning as independent of outside influence, at least ideally.”

The print culture described by Ong, it seems to me, poses three new challenges to the writer. Here’s what they are.

First, print demands that everything we write is worthy of widespread distribution and eternal preservation. This alone is enough to cause a disabling humility.

Second, print culture enlarges the author’s and the reader’s knowledge of earlier works and makes it harder to be original. I mean, harder to feel original. As Ong puts it, “modern writers, agonizingly aware of literary history and of the de facto intertextuality of their own works, are concerned that they may be producing nothing new or fresh at all, that they may be totally under the ‘influence’ of other’s texts.”

But the third challenge to the writer is the one that interest me most. The work becomes crystallized. The writer becomes helpless to correct or improve it. By publishing it he claims that it is as close to perfect as it can be. In making that claim he also admits that he has reached the limit of his skill and talent.

A writer could be understandably doubtful about making that claim and that admission.

Making the claim means exposing himself for judgment in a definitive form. He can be studied in detail and at leisure. The work’s inevitable imperfections become an unchangeable part of how strangers and future generations know him. The potential for diffidence and shame is obvious. The further risk is that the writer will never decide the work is absolutely complete and will never allow it to be set in type. And then the readers are deprived of his work completely. You could call that writer’s block, couldn’t you.

To end with, a cheery thought about block. I believe today’s mass distribution media are making writing easier again, by removing the permanence of published words. Why else are there so many blogs?

Published on November 12, 2006 at 6:07 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/writers-block-is-caused-by-print.html