A Spa for the Writing Brain

(The only spa here is metaphorical; look elsewhere for massages and LUSH products.)

Last night was another night of stymied writing, shot through with stresses and doubts and more than one self-inflicted distraction of the Interweb kind. I went to bed feeling dejected about the writing experience at large, with that nasty little snaggle-toothed thought deep in me that maybe I should just gave up. Naturally, my genius being a masochist, inspiration chose that moment to strike, and I wound up scribbling notes about my current project until I was literally so fog-brained I couldn't remember them from one note to the next. It happened again this morning.

You know what the secret was? I had given up on thinking about work.

So, it's clear that I am designing a lot of blocks for myself, though they are based on some quite reasonable stressors that I cannot really help in any logical manner. As such, after some consideration, I've come up with a few basic homework assignments for my psyche that I hope will lead to a lowered stress level and an increased inspiration level (the two are only sometimes related, and then I wouldn't call it "stress" any more than I would the feeling of being two hundred feet from the end of a marathon); and because I don't always trust myself, being a creature of immoderate moderation, I'm putting it up here on the Intertron so you can all keep me, in some distant way, honest.
I will:

• Stop talking about work outside of work, beyond answering questions others ask. Adapting to a new job is stressful, but I shouldn't let it follow me home.


• Eat only food that is healthy, energizing, and what I actually want to eat. Forcing myself to eat what I brought for lunch when a craving is upon me is reasonable when I'm craving fried chicken and chocolate cake, but if I have the spare $5 and the Beli Deli is still open, there's no reason not to get a sandwich.


• Avoid drinking before I write; drinking isn't for inspiration, it's for flying the flag of surrender.


• Submit stories on my lunch break; today's was surprisingly freeing.


• Get Microsoft Office installed on Wednesday one way or another, no later than my next paycheck.


• Keep comfy clothes clean and set aside for the night time instead of always wearing them to work.


• Do whatever I have to to regulate the temperature in my house, even if that means a slightly higher heating bill.


• Not force myself to finish Eraserhead tonight. It's entirely possible that movie sucks as much as it feels like and its writing is not writing that seems to be inspiring me to greater heights. I should finish it, but not when my writing time has to necessarily happen on the heels of doing so.


• Follow the advice of expert writers and stand ready to counteract writer's block with very long walks. This is not a bad excuse to grab the occasional bite of dessert.

That may all seem basic, or may all seem insane, but it's all really exactly what I need. Maybe that says something about my creative process. Maybe it doesn't. I leave it to history to judge my shortcomings and achievements, and also to decide which is which.

Mercury Retrograde, or Something

Some weeks, my daemon hides in the walls and drinks beer and generally tries not to work.

The week started with some very deep thought and introspection by me, and it's inspired a sort of Zen state of affairs; and this in and of itself is not a bad thing nor a hindrance, but it was exhausting to get to it, and when coupled with having plans with friends for four of the next five days and plans with family and friends on the fifth, I am not optimistic for getting a great deal of intense creative work done; and the pressure placed on tonight as my only definitively free night this week was so great that it was an uphill canoe trip just to get editing done on Book 1, Part 11 of Not Providence.

Fortunately, that editing is done, and plans may yet destabilize on one day or another, or end early, or something of that nature; and after this week is next week, and the week after that. Though I do have to say that now I really do not understand the overscheduled lives that some people of my acquaintance lead—is this maybe how people who aren't writing or otherwise artificing most nights fill their time?

Day 2: Ain't Easy

Day 2 of this week's 5 Days of Writing, and it was like pulling teeth. I ran into a major plot blockage on one section of Not Providence, of the "let it steep" variety; I just want to let it sit for a couple days. Luckily I have "Recess" to work on, which has things pretty clearly laid out, so that'll allow me to focus. I'm sure some of this has to do with being sick, and when writing while sick, I do best with either total delirium or rigid structure.

Please, continue to tell me what you think of the serial; if something about it is really sucking I want to know before I am too mired to do anything to reverse the process.

These are the days I dislike being a writer. Hopefully, the days when I love it will come tomorrow.

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.