The Fiction of Writer’s Block

The perennial question that successful authors receive at any session they conduct for aspiring writers is: “How do you deal with writer’s block?” The question assumes that they do occasionally experience the phenomenon.

I contend it does not exist. If it does, it is a figment of the imagination. If it does, there are multiple ways to make it not exist at all. There are means to make it ephemeral at best.

If I wake up and after my morning rituals proceed to my desk to begin my routine of writing (the first task on my daily agenda) to realize the well of ideas has run dry, I go for a walk. I carefully observe every item along the way, cracks in the pavement, birds in the sky, junk cars in the driveway, and the oak tree with the tire swing; up, down, and around I observe. I note the drift of the clouds, the jet overhead—bound for where? Who is aboard? The imagination takes flight as it surely should for the writer’s observant eye and mind. I smell the vegetation, the resin oozing from the pine. I touch the blade of grass and bite, tasting its white end. All senses are engaged, the mind intent on the why and wherefore behind the tennis shoe left on the shoulder of the road. The back story emerges.

Settled in my comfortable chair again, I write, describing everything I saw, heard, touched, smelled, and thought on my walk. The details pour out, because so much happened on that walk in the woods, around the neighborhood block, or down that country road. So much happened too that I didn’t see that happened before I arrived on the scene. The past and the future inhabit the shuttered clapboard house I passed.

Next I enter the haunted chamber of memory. I visit the house in which I grew up and search each room, gaze upon each shelf, and fondle my favorite stuffed animal for a moment. In my mother’s china cabinet is an heirloom teapot. I select that object to contemplate longer and then begin to write all that it evokes, everything it means to me, how it touched our family. Maybe I broke the cherished end table lamp and my father glued it together. You can choose anything from your childhood home and construct an elaborate story around it.

Or turn on the news. Write your reaction to the earthquake in Indonesia, famine in the Sudan, or the last school shooting. Write why you hate listening to the news or why you dislike television and why you prefer a good science fiction movie. Write what your life would have been like if you had married your high school sweetheart or the horror it really was because you married the man from Mars.

Responding to prompts is another way to flex your writing muscles. Many books and websites on the craft provide writing prompts. I developed this method in an adult education course I called “Writing Aerobics,” which I taught at a community college. I give the students a seed of an idea—the prompt—for a piece of writing. For instance, I tell them to think of their mother’s favorite bromide such as “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” and write a story or poem around it. I throw out an image such as “the hobbyhorse in the attic” or “the wedding cake on the sidewalk” to use as a jump-start for their imagination.  Playing a piece of instrumental music also provides a good writing exercise. I ask the students to write down everything that comes into their mind and every concrete image the music evokes. New Age, synthetic, or classical are the best kinds of music for this exercise.  I use selections from the Narada collection and David Arkenstone., and South American group Inti Illimani group. The strangeness of the music helps to release imagination.

If all else fails, just start writing anything and everything that pops into your mind—bad, inconsequential, absurd. I guarantee something will catch fire and you will run with your hair all aflame to carry that idea to its magnificent conclusion in an essay, story, or poem. But it doesn’t have to be the Great American Novel. Just keep dreaming; keep imagining.

Explore my books at mountainofdreamsbooks.com

 

Dry Spell

I am in between writing projects and I am unsure whether another story will ever consume me. I know some writers have a list of ideas for potential projects always sitting on the back burner. Sadly, I have exhausted my list just as I have exhausted items on my bucket list.  When I told a doctor that I had done everything on my bucket list, he suggested I compile a new list of things I wanted to do before I die.

I could transfer the doctor’s idea to my current dilemma, but my problem runs deeper than nothing on a writing to-do list. The real cause for disturbance is the lack of a burning conception that compels me to give it artistic shape–an idea that won’t let me sleep, and when I do sleep, inhabits my dreams. To work my way through this dry spell, I have turned to reading the works of prolific writers.  Joyce Carol Oates’s novels The Gravedigger’s Daughter and Middle Age: A Romance are better than Anne Rice’s recent offerings of Angel Time and Of Good and Evil, in which Rice’s troubled Toby O’Dare is whisked back into Renaissance times, first in England and than in Italy. Rice should have situated her story completely in the past and created a richer, denser fabric similar to what she accomplished years ago with Cry to Heaven and A Feast of All Saints.

I use reading to fire my own imagination.  While I appreciate the texture of Oates’ storytelling and I recognize the shortcomings of some of Rice’s supernatural narratives, reading their novels starts my mind churning. To force a project prematurely, I fear, is liable to result in a mediocre work or one inferior to an author’s previous work. Being prolific has its pitfalls. Great productivity doesn’t equate to works of equal greatness.

There are other methods to jump-start the creative juices. For instance, foreign travel, or maybe a hike, even a short walk off a long pier. Armchair tourism is good too. Watching an excellent film set in an equatorial jungle or in a Hungarian castle may stimulate the imagination.

So what to do?  Nothing. Simply, pass the dry spell sitting in the sun on the deck and searching the sky for signs of rain.  Or write this ditty about the dilemma:

Dry spells—empty wells—

writers sometimes have,

squeezing words, last drops

from a sponge; phrases

shrivel, dead on arrival.

 

Better to fold the arms,

look into the sky and wait

in silence for parched earth

to receive a cloud burst

when the ocean upends.

 

Better to read another’s book

and drink another’s draft,

whetting appetite for taste,

sound, smell, touch of print:

delicious rain of language

 

Better sit a spell and think

than to scratch at word-making

in dust and drought that leaves

readers hungrier than when

they begin the bland fare.

Virtues of Walking

Today I was reminded of the virtues of walking. Spring was late in coming to my neck of the woods, and here it is officially summer. Warmer and sunnier thankfully today, I walked and thought. Walking is conducive to thinking. I mostly thought about the novel I am writing. I take my walk after two hours of writing, which usually is the most I do at one sitting. I do not get so much thinking done in any other activity. Washing dishes, vacuuming, pulling weeds, any other physical activity do not produce the same results. The combination of fresh air, sun, trees, birds, and sky possess something inherently thought-provoking for me.

In my walk, I worked out many details of my story. Ideas came left and right on how I could improve or change words, sentences and paragraphs. When I arrived home, I was well-satisfied in body and soul. I immediately resumed my writing to add the ideas that had occurred to me during my walk, and I wrote an hour more before stopping.  Beyond the thoughts the walk produced; I was energized, refreshed and stimulated.  The best remedy for a roadblock in your writing is to take to the road. Walk outdoors. Solutions for that troublesome spot suddenly come to mind on a walk.

Walking’s ability to rejuvenate seems to derive from its leisurely pace. Objects do not speed by so fast as to make close observation and contemplation of them impossible. The walker can absorb the scenery.  I don’t have to huff and puff, sweat and strain with some misbegotten notion that I am molding a plump body into  perfect shape, but just relax, breath in the fresh air, and take in the sights. Walking is different from hiking. In hiking I think of climbing a steep slope, exerting myself to reach a certain height. I don’t want to climb steep grades. I want to think and to see and not to hear myself gasping to go a few feet higher up an elevation gain. I’ve done that and it has done little for my writing productivity.  But walking has enlarged my imagination and has inspired me to maintain a disciplined writing schedule.