GOOD NEWS ABOUT WRITER’S BLOCK
Your Characters Are Trying To Tell You Something.
Months ago I jotted down an idea for a blog about writer’s block. I started an article several times but it wasn’t jelling. Something was impeding me. I paced my studio muttering, snarling and shaking my head in frustration. I resorted to the time-honored tactics of untangling paper clips, going to the refrigerator, and aligning the edges of papers stacked on my desk. At length I realized what the problem was.
I had writer’s block.
Given a choice between writer’s block and confronting a grizzly bear, most writers I know would not hesitate to opt for the bear. You can run away from a grizzly or scare it away or shoot it. But no such luck with writer’s block. When the affliction strikes, you don’t know if it is short term or fatal. You fear your project is doomed. You see your career pass before you like a drowning person.
In most cases the attack is temporary, like the flu or a head cold, and is cured by going for a walk or sleeping on it. If you’ve outlined your book skillfully, you should get back on track. But the menace perpetually hovers over your work like Damocles’ sword. You begin each day’s portion in a panic, hoping the words will come when summoned but terrified the source will dry up. You know exactly what you want to say, you have a razor sharp image in your mind, but when you try to articulate it, your words come out gummy and stupid. You stare at the screen and realize you’ve been sleeping for fifteen minutes.
There are numerous causes of writer’s block. In an excellent Substack post, social media authority Suw Charman-Anderson identified several salient ones, among them: health worries, stress, perfectionism, performance anxiety, grief and depression. To this list I would add craftsmanship blunders like poor planning. As I have pointed out (see Are Outlines Necessary?), some authors eschew outlines and prefer to wing it as they go along. If they can bring their novel off spontaneously, more power to them. But all too often they wander into a morass that requires herculean effort to find their way back to the track. A detailed sketch of your characters and story will almost invariably keep you on a narrow path.
I say “almost”, but even well designed manuscripts sometimes run off the rails. A new story line may suddenly present itself mid-novel. A plot thread may demand more elaborate treatment. A new character may materialize, or a minor one bid for a more significant role. Hopefully, these are simply construction adjustments that can be resolved using tried and true fictional techniques like expanding a scene or clarifying confusing dialogue. My wife, author Leslie Tonner, says she lets her “reptile brain” solve these impasses. She means the unconscious faculty that automatically processes when you’re not thinking about the task at hand, like preparing dinner or washing dishes. (It is close to impossible for me to reconcile “reptile brain” with Leslie’s, the sharpest mind I know, but I understand what she means: Walk away and don’t think about it and the problem will probably solve itself.)
But. . . what if, for all your impeccable planning, for all your application of tried and true techniques, for all the cogitations of your reptilian brain, you’re still stuck? Well, yeah, you probably have writer’s block. But before you climb out on that window ledge, consider that this may be good news in disguise. Charman-Anderson offers a clue when she cites, as a possible cause of your creative paralysis, “rigid thinking, such as forcing a story to move in a certain direction.” She seems to be suggesting that you are pushing your characters in a direction they don’t want to go.
Wait a minute. Don’t want to go? Is she saying that your characters have volition? A mind of their own? If that is true, congratulations! You have created living, breathing, autonomous humans possessed of free will, just like you. Except that they are even more stubborn than their creator, for you have asked them to behave out of character – out of the very identity you inculcated in them – and they have sat down like mules in the road and refused to do it.
They are asking you let them do it their way.
Perhaps, instead of dismissing their demands out of hand or doubling down on your original plot, you should consider following their lead. The result may be a different story than the one you originally outlined, but it may also be a richer one, and in the process your characters will have led you out of your writer’s block. What’s more, you will have experienced a profound, mysterious and, yes, miraculous phenomenon, the Pygmalion-like creation of living beings out of the inert stuff of your imagination.
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PS: The foregoing focuses on fiction. Although nonfiction writers are also susceptible, the dynamics may be completely different for historians, biographers, essayists, polemicists and other practitioners of the nonfiction trade. I invite them to let me know how they suffered writer’s block and how –or if - they conquered the challenge.
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My first attempt at a novel was derailed by my insistence that all the characters follow my stupid plan. I completely pantsed my second, just published novel. I'm early in my third project and have split the difference: I have a fully articulated plan, but my characters are allowed to tell me to piss off as they see fit.
Nice piece! So true. I tell people who have this problem the solution is to read. Read, read, read. (This is the solution to many problems.) Of course I have the opposite problem. I think John Irvine wrote a book about it, a writer with the opposite problem, but I cannot remember the title.