My Other Blog

One controversial issue about the writing life is this— is the dreaded ailment writer’s block a real condition, or is it just an excuse for the writer who has become lazy or has run out of things to say. And can an unpublished writer get writer’s block?

To delve into this issue we must first define what writer’s block is.  According to Wikipedia, the Liberal Encyclopedia, writer’s block is  a temporary loss of the ability to begin or continue writing, usually due to a lack of inspiration or creativity.

Therefore since writer’s block is a temporary loss of this ability, to get writer’s block you must have had this ability in the first place.  So I would assume that a person who wants to be a writer, or who perhaps even has a head full of writing ideas, but is never able to translate that desire or those ideas into words-on-paper, does not have writer’s block, but perhaps may have some other type of mental block where writing is concerned.

Some writers have said that only the real, published writer may claim to have writer’s block.  I empathize in that professional writers are constantly surrounded by people who claim to be would-be writers themselves, most of whom obviously don’t have the skill set. But I disagree that published status is the key point. I would say that to have writer’s block, one must have had some degree of success at writing which is now limited by this psychological block.  In other words, one has less than one has now. So the amateur writer who can write seven chapters of a new novel before giving up in despair, but who now cannot even finish the first chapter, can claim to have writer’s block.

Different writers seem to have different writer’s blocks. The author of the Wikipedia article seems to think writer’s block is caused by a lack of creativity— one cannot think of what is going to happen next in one’s story. But this has not been my own experience. I can always think of what is going to happen next— perhaps even several contradictory somethings. The problem is with writing them down.

I tend to have deep aversions to the story I am writing on, or even turning on my word processor program, when I have my version of writer’s block.  Sometimes I also have an aversion to blogging, or even checking my blog-comments and my email. But then again I have Asperger’s Syndrome and Social Phobia, not to mention intermittant depression, and so even my writer’s block can’t be expected to be normal.

One of the causes of my writer’s block is shame. After I have written something down— committed myself to it— I find it shameful. Perhaps I feel it is too self-revealing. I don’t want to look at it, I think it’s bad and horrible and likely to cause me shame if anyone were to read it.  Yet when I read what I was writing at that point months later, I find that it was very good, at least in my own opinion.

I suppose the obvious answer is to try to be less committed to the story I am writing— to think of it, not as my breakthrough novel, but just as a job of writing work to be done, something like hackwork.  Now, if it actually reads like hackwork I am sunk, but I hope there is some middle ground where I can work on a project without feeling that my entire future self as a writer is on the line.

Another aspect of my own experience of writer’s block is when the aversion is caused not by shame but by boredom. If I have had one writing project running around in my head for a long enough time I tend to lose interest in putting it down on paper. The answer to this problem is to strike while the iron is hot; or, conversely, to let a project rest for a while and come back to it later.

As a person with Asperger’s Syndrome the writing life is an attraction to me, it’s the kind of career where personal weirdness will not get you fired. But there is also the constant fear that in this area as in others I won’t measure up, that the ‘normals’ won’t embrace my work, that I am doomed to failure.  There have been people with Asperger’s Syndrome who had successful writing careers— Herman Melville, for one. But the question is whether I am destined to become more like Melville, or more like Captain Ahab, pursuing an obsession that will kill him in the end.

Tune in tomorrow:  when there will be an update on buttockless chickens! Possibly with photos!