WRITING & CREATIVE WRITING

Is Writer’s Block a Fact or a Myth?

And the ursine-type obstacles we find in our writing career

Don’t forget to tell Joel what you’re getting up to Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

I have been writing on Medium for more than ten years now. Since 2015 I have been putting out on average at least a post per week about subjects that interest me like music, literature, food and the role of fathers/male carers in today’s world, to name a few.

You could say that with his broad palette of ideas and topics I have kept my muse active — and in full-time employment; very important in these economically straitened times. I would agree with that. I am one of those lucky souls who seems to have something to wax lyrical about on a regular basis. However, I remember reading an article in The New Yorker many years ago about writer’s block. At the time I was left speechless and pensive. Have I been lucky all these years? Is writer’s block a fact or a myth?

I use the word writer in its broadest sense, i.e., “a person who writes”, not, “a person who writes books and sells by the dozen”.

John McPhee, the author of the article in The New Yorker, is a writer, as in a “person who writes books and sells by the dozen”. He is not someone I would picture as having ever suffered from writer’s block. And yet…

McPhee begins his piece with a hypothetical Joel, one of the many Joels who write to him asking him advice on their mental obstructions. John’s answer is a mix of comedy and pragmatism. He asks Joel to think of a grizzly bear. When words fail to materialise to describe what this grizzly bear gets up to, McPhee asks Joel to write to his mother about the grizzly bear, and also about his frustration, his desperation and, above all, his block. Once he gets off his chest whatever he wants to tell his mother, the student (for I am assuming that Mr McPhee is a writing tutor) deletes all the references to his progenitor and has only the grizzly bear to deal with. Afresh.

We used to employ a similar technique at the improv troupe of which I was a part when I was in uni. It worked wonders. The only difference was that we left the mother’s bits in, too. We used to sit in a circle and someone would start a story with a sentence, say: “Peter went to the park”. Another actor had to annex another line whilst repeating the same one, for instance. “Peter went to the park and found a coin”. The key was in coming up with the next sentence in three seconds or less. If someone hesitated, they were asked to sit outside the circle. The other important element was to keep the story moving forward. Sometimes the instructor demanded that no one use conjunctions that could stem the flow, such as: but, however, yet, nevertheless, etc. The game was fun and it contributed to quick-thinking.

Does writer’s block spring from lack of this mental agility? Or should we look for the genesis of it in the disparity between a writer’s expectation(s) and the reality they face?

John McPhee’s asserts facetiously that “You could be Joel, even if your name is Jenny. Or Julie,, Jillian, Jim, Jane, Joe. You are working on a first draft and small wonder you’re unhappy. If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are struck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.”

You see John’s point.

Being a writer means dealing with the idea that you won’t like what you produce very much; especially first drafts. It is this panic of exposing yourself, revealing your innermost truths, what sometimes hinders good authors from becoming great authors. First drafts are like first auditions for amateur actors. You are suddenly facing a whole audience (your future comrades-in-arms in the am-dram troupe) and you are being asked to play a paedophile in an improvisation exercise. Self-consciousness doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Is it inevitable, writer’s block? Is it like chicken pox or measles, which you are bound to get at some point in your life?

This is one of those puzzles for which I have no answer.

I spend an awful lot of time on Medium reading posts by fellow writers and I never cease to be amazed by their constant creative output and the outstanding quality of it. They don’t seem to suffer from any mental impediment.

Is writer’s block a myth, then?

And if real, is it self-inflicted?

No, I don’t think it is a myth, or self-inflicted.

I guess that sometimes as readers, especially if you read lots of books, you will, sooner or later, be affected at a conscious level by the author in whose work you are engrossed. That could explain the constant change of style and voice in that first draft.

The other factor could well be the “Who am I kidding” question, which John McPhee still asks himself after more than forty-odd years of writing, because of all the art forms, writing is, perhaps, the most perversely intimate and open at the same time. Perverse, because there is a wilfulness about it. Like one of Laura Marling’s album titles, I Speak Because I Can. Or I Write Because I Can, as some people might put it. Intimate, because like it or not, there will be elements of your own life that will seep into your writing. And open because ultimately a writer wants to be read.

No wonder writing is such an existential ordeal. Even our hypothetical friend, the grizzly bear, would agree with that.

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Another post by me on The Daily Draft

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