Writer’s Block Begone – or How to Write When You Can’t Write

CALL IT WRITER’S BLOCK, self-sabotage, wretched indolence, what you will. Sometimes you stop writing––and it hurts.

Every fiction writer has at least one writer’s block “war story.” In a recent Poets & Writers, “Why I Write” column, Dawn Haines, who teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire, remembers what happened when, free of MFA Program structure, she stopped writing–and couldn’t get started again.

“Before long, I noticed I was feeling bad. Really bad. So bad that I wouldn’t get out of bed. I told myself that tomorrow I’d start writing, every day, just for me. But I stayed in bed and read novels and watched movies on my son’s portable DVD player. I turned on my computer only to read e-mail and catch up on American Idol news. And the longer I didn’t write, the more I felt like a failure because of all the unwritten words.”

That’s serious. That’s a nervous breakdown. Why does it have to come to that?

The reasons why we stop writing are many and various. Fear, sloth, distraction, misdirection–on and on. Not unlike the many reasons why we don’t make money, or stay in contact with old friends, or lose weight, even when part of us knows these are the very things in our lives that, if served, will give back the richest spiritual nourishment imaginable.

You can talk forever about why you’re not writing, why life is such a difficult trick for the creative writer who must be always self-motivated–and rarely for money, love, or power. But you’ll get nowhere unless you can look straight into the heart of the beast, where the answer hides in plain sight:

If you can’t write, you simply…write.

It sounds like circular logic but in fact it’s as non-circular as a sword thrust. If, against your will, with nothing to say, no ideas, you sit down and bang out 500 words–of something, anything…if you do that, do that again tomorrow, and again the next day. And the day after, and the day after that…

You will be writing again.

All of us eventually come upon this most simple of truths if we are persistent enough, or thickheaded enough, to stay in this business. Dawn Haines found it thanks to a tip from a writer friend. “Just write about not writing,”

It wasn’t much. Truly it wasn’t. But to see what you can do with “nothing much,” follow Dawn Haines’ step by step chronicle of how the lowliest, most apologetic of subjects can reignite the flame you thought you had lost forever.

So you start with what you have, even if that is less than nothing. Hemingway began by sitting in a café with an empty blue book, watching the waiter, and letting himself simply describe the waiter’s actions. The alchemists of legend could create gold only starting with the basest of materials. One thing leads to the next and to the next.

P&W hasn’t put Haines’ full column on line–but it’s well tracking down the May-June print version for her step-by-step recounting of how she progressed from the doldrums of paralysis to a productive daily writing habit.

Tagged as: procrastination, writers' block