A Case of Writer’s Block

Writers who  have never been blocked smugly insist that there’s no such thing as writer’s block. But those writers who do have it bleed a lot of ink writing about it, writers from George Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch to Camus’s Joseph Grand in The Plague and Dodie Smith’s Mortmain in I Capture the Castle. Other artists also experience the agony of blocking, it’s just that you don’t hear a lot about musician’s block or painter’s block.

I myself am suffering from a nasty post-traumatic workshop disorder which has led to my own private writer’s block. I’m even currently reading a book on it, Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease.

Click on the image below for a good illustration of what I’m talking about:

Now you may just be one of those lucky writers who poo-poo writer’s block. You may be in the camp which says, “Just start writing, fool. Saying you’re blocked is just an excuse not to face the blank page.” Even Anne Lamott tells us to be willing to write shitty first drafts. Failure, apparently, is a learning experience. And even the most prolific writers who became great wrote a few stinkers in their day. Goody for them.

But armed with all this wisdom, I’m still blocked, and have been for nearly a year. I can blog and write in my journals, no problem-o. I have a million ideas tucked away in my notebooks. But I can’t seem to elevate these ideas into a narrative with compelling characters, conflicts, and story line, that is, turn them into “art.” Here’s an example of what I’m reading in Flaherty:

Although writer’s block can have many manifestations and many causes, all blocked writers share two traits: they do not write despite being intellectually capable of doing so, and they suffer because they are not writing.

The Internet has no shortage of advice for blocked writers, but most of it isn’t very helpful, at least it hasn’t been for me. Not writing is just not the same as writer’s block. I’m going to devote quite a number of blogs to this subject as I continue through Flaherty’s book, as well as other sources I find along the way. Just writing about it might open some insights and maybe, if I’m very lucky in this effort, losening the knot.

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