Every writer writes about writer’s block at some point. In fact, I’m fairly sure I’ve started several blog posts in this manner (possibly with that same opening sentence, I do love alliteration), only to put them aside either until ‘proper’ inspiration struck, or because I felt the idea seemed trite or overdone. As I’ve said, every writer mentions it at some point (even if it’s only to say they don’t ever suffer from it, the smug paranormal-romance writing bastards).
I suppose I’m persisting with it now because I don’t really have writer’s block at the moment. For the time being, work on the novel has slowed, and I’m starting to enter the next phase: finding someone who likes it enough to represent me. It’s a frankly petrifying move, as every rejection (not many so far, but mounting) feels like a simple and solid reason to abandon the project that has consumed eighteen months of my life, taken me out of a settled existence surrounded by friends; into a place I hardly know and where no one knows me, and left me an embarrassing stretch behind other recent graduates in trying to find employment.
So the novel suffers not from writer’s block but rather writer’s paralysis. Until I find some feedback, any sort of feedback, I know not what to do with it. It can become this or it can become that, dependent on the whim and will of an agent or a publisher or the public or my friends and family. I’m confident in my writing. It’s my only talent and I have worked hard at it. If I might be allowed to bluster a moment: it’s better than Verbal Slapstick. These blog posts take roughly an hour or less, and are edited perhaps once before I upload them (this may explain why they are littered with typographical errors).
My book is in part a labour of love, and inverted, a test of skill. If someone tells me how to make it better, I am positive I can do so. I just don’t know how (which is sort of the kicker, no matter how you look at it).
A dear friend and successful author has what I believe to be the most sensible and generally successful solution for writer’s block: write around it. It doesn’t matter what you turn to, even if it’s something away from your primary project. Just getting words on paper or on screen can be enough to start the creative juices flowing (a metaphor I am unable to source, and somewhat weirded out by).
More than that, writer’s block can be just that: and obstacle to be skirted, flanked, outmanoeuvred. Some things are difficult to write about. Some things are boring to write about. Some things are challenging to write about in a way that makes sense, or is compelling, or isn’t a little cringe-worthy. Every writer has things that they personally struggle with. I don’t write sex scenes because I can’t (please don’t make any inferences here). It’s just too hard (that’s what she said). So if I feel I have to have a sex scene (and sometimes you just do) I have to find a way to write around it without looking like I’m writing around it. It’s a time-consuming and messy process (much like sex).
Another quite well-known writer of my recent acquaintance told me a good story about his own experience leapfrogging writer’s block. Finding himself completely stymied while trying to write a scene set in a sea-side cafe during winter, and finding it more a problem of atmosphere rather than description, he decided to take himself to a similar cafe and grab some photographs. Jumping on the train to some depressing sea resort he wandered around until he found a cafe comparable to the one in his imaginings, had a cup of tea and snapped some photos. He got them developed on the way home and pinned them up around his writing desk. And did not look at them once. Although he had not been paying special attention to the cafe his was in (his idea was to get the photos and be home as soon as possible, before the urge to write at all disappeared) something about the place had apparently seeped in – the look or the smell or the sad tiredness of it all – and swilled around in his head so that he returned to his desk fully equipped to carry on. Writer’s block can be defeated by ‘physical’ means: action can be taken.
You can read your way around it. This sounds like an intellectual way of saying ‘steal things from other writers’ and it sort of is, but there’s nothing malicious behind it (or at least there shouldn’t be). Stephen King said that if you don’t read then you lack the tools to write and I think that goes beyond an aphorism into straight-up profundity. Words are your tools and your building material at the same time, your clay and your wood and your chisel and saw and pencil and granite and and dynamite. The more examples, combinations, permutations you are exposed to, the more ideas you have to draw on. And I don’t mean simply by facsimile. There’s an arborescence to writing: every new word you learn, or new context you experience, increases the number of viable word-links you can make. And because of the profligate manner in which words can be joined (especially English words, the slags) the number of links increases immensely with each piece of inducted knowledge. You are constrained only by the rules of grammar (which can be bent) and those of style (which can be broken).
Finally, you just have to keep going. I have no internet connection right now, so I cannot say with authority which writer described writing as ‘staring at a blank piece of paper until your forehead bleeds’ (or something along those lines), but that is often what it feels like. Writing when it isn’t coming easy can be tortuously hard. It’s less fun than almost everything else there is to do in your house, up to and including de-scaling the kettle. But if you go away and leave it when it’s hard, chances are it will still be hard when you return (that’s what she said. I’m so sorry). It might be better to creep, creep your way across the screen, checking your word count (wisely removed from the hotkeys and appearing at the bottom of the screen on Word 2007) every few seconds, writing and deleting, writing and deleting, a frustrating arduous slog up a literary hill until... until the difficult part is over, or what you’ve written leads naturally to something else, or while you’re thinking of a way to tell this bit, you figure out how to tell that bit, or (and this happens more than one might like, but is necessary), you realise that you’re fighting a pointless battle, and you may as well chuck this whole section and start again a bit further back but with a better idea.
Writer’s block is a problem with creativity. Ergo, in order to beat it, all one has to do is create. Quality can follow on. So I don't know what to do with the book. Better start thinking about the next one.
It occurs that perhaps I should have saved writing this post for a time when I actually have writer’s block. Oops. Bit of a plus for my flatmates though: that kettle’s going to be sparkling at some point.
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