Authors: Jerry Cleaver
The strange thing is that it has nothing to do with what you need to be focusing on at the moment.
Blocking has nothing to do with the act of writing anything.
You're totally off the track, worrying about your talent, your future success, the ideas you
don't
have, all the things that
aren't
happening and that you
can't
make happen, instead of all
the things you
can
do something about at the moment. Of course, you aren't aware of what you can do, because you're so consumed with mourning the loss of your talent and your demise as a writer.
The first thing to realize is:
You're wrong—about all of it.
These kinds of negative emotions should never be trusted, because they're
always
distorted, excessive, irrelevant—completely off the track, totally beside the point. The problem is, this is an emotional game. Your emotions are your best guide. They're 99.99 percent accurate. Most of the time, there's a good reason for feeling what you're feeling. But never when they turn against you. When they do that,
they're always wrong.
So, it's like having a trusted friend who helps you with everything, whom you
must
depend on to get anything done, but who every so often without warning and for no reason decides to clobber you.
None of these worries have anything to do with actually writing something. But they come over us when we write—or when we're trying to write, so we call it writer's block. What's really in your way, what's really blocking you, are all kinds of concerns you drag into the process (is it any good? am I any good? will I ever make it?)—concerns that are irrelevant to actually putting words on the page. It begins to seem impossible. It seems impossible because it is. You've made it impossible by loading yourself down with so many concerns that you can't move. Nobody can deal with all these issues and write at the same time. It can't be done. But you can unload them so that you can start writing again. Writing doesn't have to be so hard, and it isn't. Once you learn how it works, you'll find that
easier writing is better writing.
Putting words on the page is the simplest of acts. If I were to give you a thousand dollars for every page you filled with complete sentences (anything you wanted as long as you didn't write the same sentence over and over), you'd get going fast, you'd fill a lot of pages, and, without even trying, you'd come up with lots of good ideas. So it's not
objective reality, but your state of mind (subjective reality) that's in your way. Writing is not in your way. Your worries
about writing
are paralyzing you.
Worrying and writing are two completely different acts.
These are the kinds of problems we create for ourselves when we write, and because they're so closely connected with the act of writing, we don't realize that they're not part of the writing process at all.
OK, I don't want to be splitting hairs or quibbling about definitions, but it's important to realize that
writing is a simple act,
but because of what we drag into it, we make it complicated, miserable, impossible. So, when you're blocked, you're completely distracted, you've lost all sense of proportion, and you're waging an
all-out, unrealistic,
and
unfair
attack on your work, your talent, your imagination, your chances for success, and anything else within striking distance. It's self-abuse of the highest order. I said in an earlier chapter that you have to be a sadist in order to tell a good story, to create conflict that hurts your characters and incites them to act, and you must be a masochist in order to write. This kind of pain/lunacy is why most people give up. They think they don't have what it takes (ability/talent), but that's
never the case.
What it takes, what makes you or breaks you, is whether or not you can withstand this kind of misery while you find some way around it. Identifying the source of the pain is the first step. Then, you must have an orderly, step-by-step way of treating it.
THE CULPRIT
When you get blocked, whom do you blame? Well, who's there? You. Nobody but you. So you blame yourself. And since you're to blame, whom do you punish? Same deal. You're the only one there, so it has to be your fault. You're the one who deserves punishment. Makes perfect sense, right? Maybe. Let's take a look at who gets blocked.
WHY ME?
Who suffers such misery? What kinds of writers get blocked, and how long do you have to write before it stops happening, before you outgrow it? In chapter 1 I gave you some examples of the kind of trouble some great writers had. That was a while ago, so it's worth repeating. Gustave Flaubert
(Madame Bovary)
struggled for three days, threw a monumental tantrum, rolled on the floor, banged his head against the wall—all to produce a grand total of eight sentences. Oscar Wilde
(The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest)
said, "I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out." Joseph Heller took ten years to write the novel
Catch-22.
Tom Wolfe also worked for ten years to write
A Man in Full.
So,
who gets blocked? Everybody.
Some less than others, but it's unavoidable.
What does that tell us? First, you're in good company. Second, if it happens to everybody, it's part of the process, and you shouldn't be blaming and punishing yourself for it. True, but realizing that isn't going to stop you. You
will
get blocked. You
will
blame yourself. You
will
punish yourself. You can't stop that,
but
it's possible to minimize it, to learn to catch yourself quickly, so it doesn't take you ten years to write a novel. The goal is to get the most out of yourself with the least pain and the most pleasure.
When a new writer tells me, "I never get blocked," I usually say, "You have something to look forward to." What I would like to say, but don't, is: "You don't know enough yet." The more you know, the more possibilities there are for blocking yourself. The better you write—the more inventive and skillful and ingenious you become at ambushing yourself. You're never beyond it. You never outgrow it, because it grows with you.
So, if it happens to all writers, does it make sense to blame yourself when it happens to you? Could it be that something in
the process makes blocking inevitable,
something that has nothing to do with you personally and is in no way a reflection on you, your character, or your talent? It could be and it is. It's the process, not you. It's all part of the game of writing, and you can learn to master it just as you can learn to tell a compelling story.
HOW LONG IS TOO LONG?
Heller and Wolfe took 10 years to get their novels done, but, as I pointed out in chapter 1, Nabokov wrote
Lolita
in 3 months. A famous novel of some years ago,
Goodbye, Mr. Chips,
was written in 4 days. It was a slim little novel, but if they had been written at the same rate, Heller and Wolfe's novels would have been finished in months instead of years. A number of full-length novels have been written in a couple of months. So, the question is: how long should it take? Well, that's going to vary. Four-day, 2-month, or 6-month novels are rare. A novel a year is very prolific. One to 2 years is respectable. Serious novelists often take 3 to 5 years. Philip Roth says he writes for 6 months to produce one hundred pages, from which he then pieces together one decent page. If he's lucky, he says, that page is the start of his next novel. Six months for one page—does it have to be?
The 10-year novel, the four-day novel—what's the difference? I'm sure that Heller and Wolfe didn't bang away, writing every day, full-time for 10 years to write their novels. Their novels took 10 years, but a lot of time had to be spent stricken, disabled, spinning their wheels. But, as I keep saying, it doesn't have to be that way. What makes the difference is not
how much time you spend writing,
but
how much
time you waste trying
to write. Most writers
waste
enormous amounts of time and energy
trying
to make it happen.
And then there's another issue that squeezes in here somewhere.
YOU'VE GOT IT, OR YOU DON'T
There are those who say, "You've got it, or you don't. There's no substitute for talent." Talent—what part does it play in all of this? How do you know if you've got any? What if you don't? Can you get some? How much do you need? Is it necessary? Is it worth worrying about? Well, 1 can tell you: There's no special talent needed to write publishable stories—all you need is your own emotions and your own life experience. In the other arts—music or painting, for example—you may need a special, inborn talent. But writing is different. It's different because life skills are writing skills. Everyone has a full set of emotions and plenty of dramatic, painful, and exciting experiences to draw on. You have more than enough inside you already than you'll ever be able to use. That doesn't mean you have to write about yourself or your personal experience. But what you have in you now is enough to imagine any kind of story you choose. Plus, the standards for publication aren't high. Plenty of talentless writers are making fortunes. Look around. They're not hard to find.
Have you ever heard the saying "It's ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration." Well, it is never truer than when referring to writing. And 90 percent is a damn good average—plenty good enough to get published. Now, that's not to say there isn't such a thing as talent or genius and that it doesn't come into play at some point. But that point is for something like the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award or the Nobel Prize, but not for making a living or writ-
ing a bestseller. Most successful writers don't get those big awards. The only talent you need to be successful is a talent for work.
Storytelling is an acquired skill, not an inborn talent.
There is a substitute for talent. It's
work + craft.
Work hard, learn your craft, and the rest will take care of itself. Craft is the issue. You have everything else already.
No special talent needed.
OK, let's get back to our examination of blocking.
THE LITTLE MAN UPON THE STAIR
One way to get some insight into the state you're in when you're blocked is to compare the symptoms to those of psychological depression. One of the symptoms in clinical depression is a sense of doom—eternal gloom and doom. Things are awful. They're going to stay that way. They'll never be good again. The depressed person doesn't think,
I feel horrible, but I'll get through this, recover, and feel good again.
And when you're blocked, you're never thinking,
This is awful. I feel worthless and talentless, but I know that's just a state all writers get into. I'll get through this and write really well again.
No, if you have that much perspective, you're not in the throes of a serious block. When you're truly blocked, even though you may know that all writers get blocked, you're certain your block is like no block in writing history. For you, it's truly the end. You'll never write a decent sentence again as long as you live.
The other symptom of this kind of depression is hostility turned against yourself—an all-out attack. Olivier, in belittling the audience ("Not one of you bastards . . ."), was instinctively doing the right thing—trying to turn the hostility away from himself. Of course, no one in the audience was hostile toward him. They loved him. He
could have fallen on his face, and they would have applauded. They weren't the enemy, but it was better to attack them than himself. The enemy without is less threatening than the enemy within.
My Psychology 101 textbook defined what they called
free-floating anxiety
as "a vague objectless dread." That's especially apt for blocking. Vague, yes, because often you don't even let yourself think about writing; you keep it out of your consciousness as much as possible. You have a vague dread that if you go sit down, it's going to be awful. You keep it out of your head because you don't want to face up to what a coward you are (too scared to sit down and put words on a page). The psychology book quoted a poem that characterized this kind of anxiety.
I saw a man upon the stair.
The little man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish the hell he'd go away.
Maybe he'll go away on his own, but we can't afford to wait around gambling that he will. We have to find a way to get rid of him. But we need to finish with our examination of blocking first.