In Which Our Narrator Once Again Laments

I am, in multiple senses, a student of writer's block. I've experienced it a great many times in my life, as a result of a great many factors--indeed, I feel like it's many times easier to prevent good writing than to create it--and yet, I never know when it's coming to hit me, I never know how long it's going to last, and I never know what the key is going to be that unlocks the floodgates and lets me put my internal world back in order. It is my long-considered opinion, in fact, that anyone who claims to have a surefire cure for writer's block (especially anyone who insists that you try their cure) has either never really experienced writer's block or never really experienced the act of writing. Right now, as I write this, is one of the moments that I know I'll be studying once it's passed.

I could write a great many posts on writer's block (a minor irony that I never tire of considering). Indeed, I have an essay brewing right now, or perhaps it's a rant, about the curious alchemy of the writing mind and the multitude of things that can send one's brain plummeting into the place where a blank page opens up before your eyes and roars for your blood. (Can you tell I'm a bit annoyed at the current state of affairs?) But for tonight, I have been musing on a different aspect of the issue, and I have to posit the argument that there is more than one kind of writer's block.

The classic writer's block, of course, is the kind Hollywood loves to show you, the kind that gets played for schadenfreude and laughs: the writer hunched over his typewriter or bashing his eyeballs against the screen with a cloud of mismatched words storming overhead. I've had this one; hell, everybody who's ever been introduced as knowledgeable about a subject of conversation has had this one, the sudden mental lockdown and the panicked scrabbling for words. (Now those of you who are readers but not necessarily writers know what I mean, don't you? I promise I won't claim you owe me anything.) I absolutely hate this, as it clashes horribly with my quasi-Puritan devotion to writing regularly, or rather, it engenders the clash between my need to write regularly and my desire to write well, because what good is it doing me if all I'm producing is crap?

But there is another variety of writer's block out there, and it's far more pernicious. This is the stealth writer's block, the block that is even more insidious because you don't realize you're blocked. You're sticking to whatever writing schedule it is you like, and ideas are hitting your brain at full force. Narratives unwind and braid together in front of you, characters walk out of the back rooms of your brain and start to spout dialogue and put on quirks and habits for you to compliment or reject; but then, around about 4000 words in, you sit back, and all you can see are the ways in which you've produced what is often colloquially termed "a steaming pile".

Some writers might think this was preferable, and certainly I have from time to time--after all, you're still productive, right? This is better than only being able to work on your screenplay about Elvis's epic battle with Bigfoot for the living, beating Heart of America. This way, at least there might be some good seeds in with the blighted and miserable.

Unfortunately, this kind of block seeps into everything. You look at what you wrote and all you can see are the terrible, self-aggrandizing turns of phrase, the wooden dialogue, the little hairline cracks in the plot, and rather than rolling up one's sleeves and trying to make these things work you just throw them all away, because really, it's not worth it. This kind of blockage plays upon one of the most important skills a writer can have--the good sense to know that an idea isn't going to clean up to be any less vile, and discard it before too much energy is poured into it. It's dangerous, because sometimes that's true, God knows I've written more than one story that I've read five years later only to say "Really?"; but on the other hand, Huxley hated the ending to Brave New World, and Kafka wanted his stories burned after his death rather than published. Just as a writer can't always find the flaws in a manuscript by himself, so too a writer can't always find the moments of perfection, and it is this fact which stealth blockage prevents you from remembering.

Take my current situation: I finished a 10,000 word story three weeks ago, but I barely care. I'm 4,500 words into another story, and all I can think is that it probably sounds like a novel someone else wrote somewhere (I have a specific someone in mind, but there's a chance that (a) I'm wrong and (b) that in saying who I might spoil it, which proves that I'm not completely mired in this latest bout of blockage). I started my fourth novel and then stopped again 1,000 words in, and while I've got the introductions to this and about three other stories in mind, all I can do is pour a higher word count into a story I'm not sure is going anywhere, or at least not anywhere good. Heck, I'm so blocked up right now that I can't even find a witty way to end this. In fact, that last sentence was originally going to cap off the entire post. Yes, it's really that bad.

But none of this bothers me so much as the concern that maybe I'm not blocked, maybe I'm just spending my time on bad ideas. And that in and of itself does not concern me as much as the worst part of either kind of writer's block, hands down: the knowledge that it's going to end. Because the only thing more terrifying to a writer than the thought of not being able to write is the thought of having absolutely no excuse, and the only thing worse than worrying something you're writing is terrible is knowing it with crystal clear, unbiased certainty.

I'll come out of this again. I'll start loving to write again--heck, I've gotten a little thrill just from penning this, though I am as I post this concerned it didn't flow very well. But every time I do emerge, I can't help but turn a wary eye to the part of me that really wishes I didn't have to. And that, no matter the type of writer's block, no matter the reason for its appearance in my life, is the absolute worst part: the fact that when you don't have to write, there is a level on which it feels good.