Category Archives: fiction writing
The Curious Case of the Unblocked Writer
Posted on October 15, 2010 by Zen of Not Writing
One of the weirder forms of writer's block I've encountered occurs in writers who do not believe themselves to be blocked.
Indeed, these writers often appear to be massively productive, write on a regular schedule, and have loads of high opinions about the quality of their "exciting" work. The problem is: they often produce tedious piles of crap that no one else wants to read.
As a writing teacher, I see scenarios like this all the time: a highly confident student who traumatizes his blocked peers by writing an extra ten pages on the history of the solar cell but is later "puzzled" and "stunned" when he earns only a gentleman's "C" (1).
The trend is even more pronounced in the creative writing classroom where the depressed, yet beglittered, student who likes faeries writes about graphic sex in a community of Smurf-like creatures but fails to understand why her work wasn't accepted into the school's literary magazine. "But, professor, the rapist's sweater really was a cerrulean blue that exactly matched the crystal-clear, glacial pond to which wisdom still clung by its long, banyanesque roots."
So why are these otherwise well-intentioned writers so deeply unaware of the emetic-like effect of their writing? Why is it that they are so quick to point out the Limburger in someone else's writing and yet totally unable to apply the "sniff test" to their own mountains of verbal diarrhea?
My sense is that, in their overly ambitious quest to produce something great, they have learned to question or distrust their own instincts and, instead, to substitute someone else's ideas about what's great. In effect, they have lost their way by caving in to a kind of vile, Junior-High-like thinking that goes like this: if I just do what everybody else wants me to do, everything will be all right and I'll be popular! And if I do it to excess, I'll be really popular!
But, as my uneven reputation at Hillside Junior High can indubitably attest, what we think is cool and what is actually cool are two entirely different things.
Stuck in a hell realm of trying to be too cool, these writers continue to make this same pubescent mis-calculation: they think that other peoples' beliefs or ideas about the world are actually true. And, in this case, they think that those beliefs count as manifestations of their own creative insight.
Like the mullet, this mistaken thinking creates a schizophrenic effect: the more the writer tries up-front to write something interesting, the more repulsive and tasteless it becomes in the end.
You see, as readers, we just want the goods–nothing more and nothing less. And, more importantly, we want the goods with just a modicum of suggestion from the author. Being the narcissistic souls we all are, we like the idea of "an author" but we don't really want to occupy all of his or her geeky world in excruciating detail.
We just want him to sketch it out so that we can color the rest in for ourselves. Putting all the goody-two-shoes reasons for reading aside, most of us love to read because we love putting our two cents into something. And, by reading, we get to build somebody else's world the way we want it to look–not the way the author intended. That's why we always prefer the book over the movie.
And we like the book even more when it's real and flawed–not perfect, overly decorated, and spectacularly adjectivalized. So, as much as we all wanted to be Jaclyn Smith growing up, nobody really likes spending her time reading about a smart, sassy character who manages to kick gluteus maximus in burgundy-colored Joan and Davids and a downy-soft, mohair monk's sweater in Creme Freche from Eileen Fischer (2).
No, we like somebody like ourselves–you know, somebody who spills Starbucks in the crotch of her camel-hair trousers as she's dashing in to the scheduling meeting where she will have to face Tom and pretend for the next 30 minutes that that little pink "YES!" didn't show up this morning.
And this kind of character can emerge only if the writer learns how to listen to her own inner voice and not the one that sounds an awful lot like Shauntel Sanders and those other tween fashionistas who suggested that your pink-polka-dot-tie and wide-wale cords "worked well" with the saddle shoes and the green argyle socks (3).
"OK," you say, "So I need to listen to the voice. I get it. But where the fuck is it?"
Don't worry, it hasn't gone anywhere. It's still right there inside of you. You just probably haven't listened to it for a while because, the last time you did, it suggested that you eat something other than brownies and posited that Steve–or was it Dylan?–wasn't worth the 50 ensuing years of Valtrex.
Yeah, that one. You have to start listening to her.
Now, a lot of really smart and successful people like to jump in at this point and complexify this situation with a whole lot of religious strategery (4). They will give you very different, high-falutin' names for that voice: God, the Divine, Buddha Nature, The Self, Spirit, Being, Nothingness, or, my all-time fave, Supreme Enlightened Consciousness.
Hello! Why don't we just strap ourselves to the bed and cry out other for another injection of Dilotid to stop the insanity.
My recommendation: bring it down a notch. A serious notch. You don't need to go all Buddhist and shit to find that voice. Really. If you want to hear it, you just have to do one thing: shut the fuck up.
But a word of warning: after shutting the fuck up, you have to listen closely and carefully. It's not loud. OK, my voice is not loud. Yours may be entirely different. Yours may be obnoxiously robust and Pushcart-Prize-ready regardless of whom you blew last night.
But not mine. Mine is quiet and ephemeral. Dazzling. It's like an exquisitely sensitive butterfly–very beautiful, totally free to fly anywhere, but very easy to squash with one wrong turn of the wheel. All I need to do is subject it to a hangover or an emotional trainwreck of a good friend who stops by unexpectedly for tea, and it vanishes instantly.
So, here's my trick: I try to lead a quieter life and give myself the space to capture what it says immediately–by pen, by iPhone, smokes signals, or what have you. If I don't, it just disappears for all time and eternity. And that's a brutally sad thing.
(1) Meanwhile, his peers start shopping for black trenches and a copy of Deadly Doses: A Writer's Guide to Poisons.
(2) Psst . . . none of the boys really liked that angel anyway. They wanted the dumb one whose hair looked like it had been mix-mastered with a gallon of Aqua-Net. And, if I'm being honest, I really didn't want to be any of the angels. I wanted to be a fighter pilot like Athena and have sex with Starbuck on the Galactica–circa 1976.
(3) Not that I'm still bitter about that or anything . . .
(4) Yes, this sentence is an ode to our incompetent former president whose most recent bumper-sticker memorialization has thrilled the cockles of my heart, "Like a Rock, Only Dumber!" Karma's a bitch, isn't it?
Posted in dissertations, essay writing, fiction writing, kinds of writing, overcoming writer's block, writer's block, writers, writing lifestyle, writing process	| Leave a reply
5 of 5 stars to Empire Falls by Richard Russo goodreads.com/review/show/26… 5 months ago
5 of 5 stars to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondō goodreads.com/review/show/27… 9 months ago
@ohheytheremere Any chance you might be willing to talk to my Travel Writing class at Johns Hopkins via Skype? It… twitter.com/i/web/status/9… 1 year ago
Whose line is it, anyway? Improv class teaches student engineers to think on their feet lnkd.in/dYY9VXA 2 years ago
lnkd.in/e6_5tM7 3 years ago
Follow @zenofnotwriting