3

Writer’s Block as State of Mind

Creative imagination and work go together with me; I take no delight in anything else. That would be a prescription for happiness were it not for the fact that one’s productivity depends entirely on sensitive moods. What is one to do on a day when thoughts cease to flow and proper words won’t come? One cannot help trembling at this possibility.

—Sigmund Freud

 

June 7. Bad. Wrote nothing today. Tomorrow no time.

—Franz Kafka

 

HYPERGRAPHIA IS NEITHER PAINFUL (except sometimes to the reader) nor common. Writer’s block is both. All of us have had twinges of it, 10 percent of college students have significant writer’s block, and half of all graduate students end up All But Dissertation. In professional writers the syndrome is an obsession, and many writers have transferred the obsession to their characters. In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, for instance, the idealistic Dorothea, who has married Mr. Casaubon to devote her life to his scholarship, is filled with horror as she begins to realize that he will never put out: “‘And all your notes,’ said Dorothea . . . ‘all those rows of volumes—will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world?’” Or there is Joseph Grand in Albert Camus’s The Plague, pathetically filling page after page with versions of his novel’s first sentence. Or even Margret and H. A. Rey, authors of the children’s book Curious George, who also wrote a book about a penguin who ran out of stories to tell his audience.

 

Figure 5. Rebus Charivariques (c. 1840). A French drawing from one of the fanciful alphabets popular at the time. It is, perhaps accidentally, a wordless illustration of writer’s block.

 

Dissecting writer’s block is as difficult as carving meatloaf at the joints. We are not always even sure we are blocked. (Am I blocked or just talentless? Am I blocked or do I just hate my assignment?) But everyone agrees that block is a mental state. In this chapter I attempt to figure out what that means and then look at explanations of block in those terms. The next chapter looks at the beginnings of our understanding of block as a brain state.

 

What It Feels Like

 

Although writer’s block can have many manifestations and many causes, all blocked writers share two traits: they do not write despite being intellectually capable of doing so, and they suffer because they are not writing. That definition, though simple, allows us to peel away several other states that have important differences from writer’s block.

In some ways block is a phenomenon opposite to hypergraphia. Yet in some surprising ways the two brain states are complementary without actually being opposites, which is why a writer can alternate between hypergraphia and block. Writers can even be hypergraphic and blocked at the same time, as when Joseph Conrad frantically wrote letters to friends while putting off his novels:

 

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day—and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. Sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking the baby and alarming my wife. After such crises of despair I doze for hours, still held conscious that there is that story that I am unable to write. Then I wake up, try again, and at last go to bed completely done up. So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with that horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts. . . .

I seem to have lost all sense of style and yet I am haunted by the necessity of style. And that story I can’t write weaves itself into all I see, into all I speak, into all I think, into the lines of every book I try to read. . . . I feel my brain. I am distinctly conscious of the contents of my head. My story is there in a fluid—in an evading shape. I can’t get hold of it. It is all there—to bursting, yet I can’t get hold of it any more than you can grasp a handful of water. . . .

I never mean to be slow. The stuff comes out at its own rate. I am always ready to put it down . . . the trouble is that too often, alas, I’ve to wait for the sentence, for the word. . . . Theworst is that while I’m thus powerless to produce, my imagination is extremely active; whole paragraphs, whole pages, whole chapters pass through my mind. Everything is there: descriptions, dialogue, reflection, everything, everything but the belief, the conviction, the only thing needed to make me put pen to paper. I’ve thought out a volume a day till I felt sick in mind and heart and gone to bed, completely done up, without having written a line. The effort I put out should give birth to Masterpieces as big as mountains, and it brings forth a ridiculous mouse now and then.

 

This long passage, even longer in the original, paints vividly the sick horror of feeling blocked. But its verbosity also shows how closely related hypergraphia and at least some writer’s block can be in the overpowering desire to write.

Defining block as writing less (much less) than the writer wants to has the result that there can be writers with normal productivity who have an agonizing sensation of block because they are not as productive as they want to be. Conrad, for instance, despite the harrowing passage on the previous page, turned out books quite regularly. While those of us who are less productive may grumble that his was not true block, the sensation of block is so closely related to true block that the two should be considered together.

The sensation can arise from different roots. There is the writer’s throbbing self-criticism, which may itself be the source of the block. There is also the strangled feeling of inarticulateness, of ideas coming faster than words, of not being able to express what is inside. And there may also be the dull gnawing of feeling empty, of having no ideas to express.

Why is suffering a major criterion for writer’s block? Because someone who is not writing but not suffering does not have writer’s block; he or she is merely not writing. Such times may instead be fallow periods for the development of new ideas, periods Keats famously described as “delicious diligent indolence.” You might think it would be easy to tell not writing from writer’s block, but that is not always so. As an example, the novelist Paul Kafka-Gibbons decided to take a relaxing summer off from writing his novel. He then spent those months wrestling with his psychoanalyst, who thought he should face the fact that he had writer’s block.

Kafka-Gibbons’s experience highlights the role that other people’s attitudes can have in creating at least the appearance of writer’s block. Students who seem blocked often turn out instead to have a secret dislike of their subject—or their teacher, or their parents. Conversely, a sort of external block can arise when the not-writer wants to write but is repressed by society. The oppression can be internalized until the not-writer believes the block is something within her, that she cannot write because she has nothing valuable to say. Such cases are common, and if the not-writer has internalized the authority figure’s values well enough, they may shade smoothly into true writer’s block.

Thus, some writers are left with self-criticism or perfectionism as a source of block—in Franz Kafka’s words, having “to see the pages being covered endlessly with things one hates, that fill one with loathing, or at any rate with dull indifference.” Kafka’s self-assessment led to his famous deathbed plea to Max Brod to burn all his work. Instead, of course, Brod published it. Did he betray Kafka? Or was he the external force that Kafka invoked to help him fight his internal critic? (Kafka-Gibbons, a distant relative of Kafka, plans to avoid this sort of controversy by making sure his epitaph reads “Publish all I’d burn.”)

Much popular psychology aimed at curing writer’s block explicitly attempts to defang internal critics. Here, though, issues of skill arise—some internal critic is necessary for good writing. One poet has said that there is no such thing as writer’s block if your standards are low enough. Should we want to bring every writer’s judgment down to the level of his or her ability? Or is curing a mediocre writer of the inhibitions of perfectionism a disservice to writer and reader alike?

Writer’s block is not agraphia, the selective loss of the skill to write (usually caused by strokes, and strikingly rare). Unlike agraphia, writer’s block tends to be restricted to a genre or particular project, with all other forms of writing normal. Coleridge, for instance, was a fluent—sometimes even hypergraphic—journalist, correspondent, and metaphysical speculator. Yet when he tried to write poetry, Coleridge complained, he “beat up Game of far other kind—instead of a covey of poetic Partridges with whirring wings of music . . . up came a Metaphysical bustard, urging its slow, heavy, laborious, earth-skimming flight over dreary and level Wastes.” Why was poetry different from metaphysics or journalism for Coleridge? Crucially, he thought of himself primarily as a poet, not a journalist; his poetry mattered most to him and he worked hardest on it. Thus, what mattered most to him was most difficult. I will discuss one of the brain mechanisms by which this may occur in the next chapter.

Further evidence that writer’s block is not closely related to agraphia is a variant of writer’s block in which the blocked writer actually writes more, even if badly. Oliver Sacks tells of an agonizing block while writing Uncle Tungsten that caused him to write and throw away about two million words for a book of one hundred thousand words. This sort of “high-output block” presumably needs a different sort of treatment from low-output block.

Nonetheless, there is something that writer’s block shares with agraphia and also aphasia (loss of the basic ability to speak). That is the suffering inherent in being unable to communicate. It characterizes high-output as well as low-output block; the panicked writing is a desperate attempt to be understood. And being unable to communicate can cause depression, which in turn can cause an inability to communicate.

 

Some aspects of block may be culturally determined. The phrase “writer’s block” was coined by an American, a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler. Jay Parini has slyly suggested that not only the name “block” but even blocked writing itself may be a peculiarly American habit:

 

Trollope’s calmly professional attitude towards writing . . . remains a kind of unspoken ideal for contemporary British writers like Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Iris Murdoch, and A. N. Wilson—all of whom regard productivity as a virtue. . . . By contrast, contemporary American writers—Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, William Styron, Norman Mailer and Thomas Pynchon—often harbor long silences, publishing in gigantic, well-publicized spasms. A few of our best writers—J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Grace Paley and Harold Brodkey—have fashioned whole careers out of the sound of one hand clapping.

 

In other ages and cultures, writers were not thought to be blocked but straightforwardly dried up. One literary critic points out that the concept of writer’s block is peculiarly American in its optimism that we all have creativity just waiting to be unlocked. By contrast, Milton when he could not write felt that he was empty, that there was no creativity left untapped.

If writer’s block is more common in the United States, it would not be the first weakness that is peculiar to our culture. The modern American idea of the literary writer is so shaped by the towering images of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald struggling with every word, that there is a paradoxical sense in which suffering from writer’s block is necessary to be an American writer. Without block once in a while, if a writer is too prolific, he or she is suspected by others of being a hack. Nonetheless, of the first six descriptions of block in this chapter—Freud, Kafka, Eliot, Camus, the Reys, and Conrad—none were American. Gustave Flaubert, for instance, had a drive to write that was nearly matched by his drive to rewrite, at one point leading him to exclaim, “What a waste of paper, what a number of crossed-out passages.”

As a thought experiment, take away from writer’s block the problems of motivation and skill. What is left, arguably, is the problem of inspiration—skilled writing that is highly motivated but without the quality that makes some writing transcendent. Fitzgerald was one of many writers who believed that inspiration is finite, something that can be used up:

 

I have asked a lot of my emotions—one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story. It was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

Once the phial was full—here is the bottle it came in.

Hold on, there’s a drop left there. . . . No, it was just the way the light fell. . . .

 

Although most psychologists and writing teachers distrust the Romantic notion of an inspiration that is separate from skill or hard work, and doubt the claim that one can write at one’s best only when “in the mood,” so many professional writers take these notions seriously that perhaps we should too. After all, psychologists, as opposed to professional writers, are not known for writing well. Perhaps it is in part because they follow their own advice to write while not inspired. As Norman Mailer put it, “Writing at such a time [against one’s inclinations] is like making love at such a time. It is hopeless, it desecrates one’s future, but one does it anyway because at least it is an act. Such writing is almost unsprung. . . . If you can purge it, if you get sleep and tear it up in the morning, it can do no more harm than any other bad debauch.”

Perhaps the most practical implication is not to keep yourself from writing when not inspired, but to be ruthless about writing whenever inspiration hits. This approach requires always having paper or a palmtop computer with you, and above all to avoid answering the door or e-mail when you are in the middle of something good. Keep in mind the useful (if probably apocryphal) cautionary tale of Coleridge’s person from Porlock—the businessman who, by detaining Coleridge for an hour, terminated the composition of “Kubla Khan.”

Literary critics often use the notion of inspiration to explain the careers of writers who stopped being able to write. Thus they sometimes describe Wordsworth’s career as falling into three stages. In the first he had both inspiration and judgment, and produced such radiant works as Lyrical Ballads. In the second, he still had judgment but wrote explicitly about his lack of inspiration, as in The Prelude. In the third stage he seemed to have lost his judgment as well and produced endlessly dull verse. (Even literary critics tend to adopt the medicalized language of disease when discussing late Wordsworth, as in Francis Jeffrey’s 1814 review of The Excursion—which starts with the immortal line “This will never do!” and goes on to argue that “we can only watch the progress of [Wordsworth’s] symptoms” and “wait in patience for the natural termination of the disorder.”) To some extent Coleridge took an approach opposite to Wordsworth’s in later life; when his inspiration stopped, he more or less stopped writing.

Nonetheless, writing regularly, inspiration or no, is not a bad way to eventually get into an inspired mood; the plane has to bump along the runway for a while before it finally takes off. In practice, most writers find some balance between bowing to their muse and doggedly writing, whether inspired or not. My own balance flipped after my postpartum break. Before, I felt I had my muse firmly by the throat and wrote, if in a pedestrian way, when it pleased me. Since my illness, I have given up any pretense of being in command. I strain my nerves for the faintest sense of the feeling that I should write, the feeling that my feet are starting to lift off the ground. Although I sit down to write every day at five in the morning, on the days when my muse has left me, I can no longer pretend that I sit down because I am in control of the situation. I am not writing but doing penance for all the days when the muse spoke and I failed to listen.

 

What is the relationship between writer’s block and block in other fields—musician’s block, sculptor’s block? Is writer’s block more common, or is it just that more is written about it because it interests writers more? Probably the latter. When we look carefully, there is ample evidence of other blocks. The Hungarian composer György Kurtág, for instance, described an intermittent “compositional paralysis,” of which he said dryly, “The child decides when it wants to be born—not its mother.” All forms of block cause frustration, feelings of inadequacy, and sometimes financial worry; but writer’s block, tied to language more directly than other art forms, is perhaps most likely to bring with it the suffocating feeling of being unable to express oneself.

What tends to be called block, whether painter’s or potter’s or physicist’s, is generally restricted to a field seen as creative or artistic, in which the problem is not well defined and requires more divergent than convergent thinking. At the other end of the spectrum are careers where the problem is well defined, where most of the thinking is convergent. One of the paradoxical joys of medicine and other applied sciences is their relative freedom from block. When you find a vascular surgery patient with blood spurting from her graft site, the response required—if you have medical training—is usually immediate and obvious. At least, it is obvious compared to a task such as writing the great American novel.

 

Block as “All in Your Head”

 

Explanations of writer’s block in terms of mental states have varied wildly. Nearly all, however, follow a simple formula. The explainer takes his preferred school of psychology and finds examples of writer’s block that fit his theory best. Very few theorists try to address all the different types of block. And, for obvious reasons, few writers on block are writers with block—blocked writers are not the ones who get the book deals. Some explanations can get fairly theoretical. All the same, there may be something to learn from theories that think about us a little differently from the way we think about ourselves. In Albert Einstein’s words, a chemical analysis of a cup of soup shouldn’t be expected to taste like the soup.

Of all the academic explanations of writer’s block considered here, those of cognitive psychology have the most familiar tone. Cognitive psychology falls between behaviorism and the depth psychologies such as psychoanalysis. Unlike behaviorism, cognitive psychology talks freely of mental states and sees them as crucial in understanding behavior. Unlike depth psychology, it does not focus strongly on the effect that unconscious emotion can have on performance. It stresses the role of conscious skills like evidence collection, problem definition, and decision making.

The writing researcher Mike Rose argues that many cases of writer’s block stem less from emotional problems than from deficits in cognitive skills; for instance, having overly rigid compositional strategies. Such as a rule against sentence fragments. Another skill problem is too-early editing: a writer begins criticizing and altering a text before there is enough of a rough draft to evaluate. Rose’s cognitivist model explains why writers are more likely to get blocked on hard projects than on easy ones. The model would seem to best fit unskilled writers, but Rose grants that, surprisingly, professional writers are as likely to get blocked as inexperienced ones. It may be that when faced with compositional problems that are knotty enough, even gifted professionals can end up blocked.

The literary critic Zachary Leader raises the example of Mark Twain, who had a long period of apparent writer’s block while writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Was the block caused by a cognitive problem with plot and structure? Twain began the book in 1876, and quickly reached a point at which he had Huck and Jim escaping north up the Ohio River to free Jim. Then he broke off, as if he did not know what to do next with the plot. Over the next few years, Twain added only a few chapters—although he was able to complete other books successfully. Eight years after starting the book, Twain finally abandoned the trip north and allowed Huck and Jim to continue to float down the Mississippi. In a sudden outpouring of some of his best writing, he finished the book in only three more months, often writing three thousand to four thousand words in a sitting. Thus, on a cognitivist description, a rough spot in the plot—the trip north—caused Twain’s block.

Nonetheless, Leader argues that when Twain and most fluent professional writers are blocked, what appear to be cognitive problems actually have emotional causes—as when a poet begins to edit too early in his composition not because he doesn’t know better, but because his disapproving father’s recent visit has made him more self-critical. On Leader’s retelling of Twain’s block, Twain had trouble writing about going up the Ohio River because he had no strong emotional tie to that river. Floating down the Mississippi, on the other hand, resonated with his early experiences as a steamboat pilot. Changing the direction of Huck and Jim’s journey was not a logical solution to a technical problem, but an emotional solution. In fact, it would have been more logical for them to escape north than to drift downstream farther away from Jim’s freedom.

The divide between Rose’s cognitivist and Leader’s emotivist interpretations of Twain’s block (I am oversimplifying their thoughtful positions) reflects a long-standing divide in Western psychological theory between affective and cognitive processes, between thought and feeling. Although the divide has been conceptually fruitful, in real life it is often hard to separate the two phenomena. Emotions influence the content of thought; beliefs shape emotions. The two intertwine tightly in the very process that leads someone to become a writer, or indeed to take up any true vocation. We learn to do well what we love, and we learn to love what we do well. Conversely, in writer’s block, we often learn to hate what we don’t have the skill to do well, and that makes us do it even more poorly.

What would a cognitivist approach to treatment of writer’s block look like? It might, of course, look uncomfortably like the sort of freshman composition class that provides block diagrams with named stages—Brainstorming, Outlining, Writing, Editing, and so on—that to me were about as helpful as trying to learn how to dance by looking at those diagrams with the little footprints. Slightly more advanced approaches might include more sophisticated tips (Chekhov’s “a rifle hanging on the wall in the first act must be fired by the third act”)—although these guidelines sometimes act more as soothing emotional supports than as cognitive ones.

In some parts of the country, writer’s workshops are as common as gun clubs are in others (one adult school near me gave five courses on writer’s block in a single semester). Such workshops often take a cognitive approach at a third level of abstraction, roughly equivalent to cognitive-behavioral therapy. CBT is a widely used psychotherapeutic technique that can help problems such as depression that, although emotional, also have cognitive aspects. CBT attempts to change beliefs that lead to negative views of the self (“I am a bad writer”), of experience (“Unless everything is perfectly quiet, I can’t try to work”), and of the future (“I will be blocked forever”). Such cognitive strategies couple to behavioral ones: breaking tasks into smaller chunks, diversion from tortured thoughts through exercise or socializing, desensitization of the writing tasks that cause the fear.

 

Psychodynamic explanations of writer’s block emphasize the importance of unconscious desires and fears rather than conscious cognition. As a neurologist, I was trained to think of psychodynamic and especially psychoanalytic therapy as unscientific, if grudgingly necessary in cases where patients had issues with their parents, hated pills, or had Ph.D.s in comparative literature (a field still alive with post-Freudians). During my postpartum break I watched in amusement and horror as my beliefs shifted. Discussions of fantasies and unconscious motives fascinated me; pills, previously such clever little tools, became barely tolerable assaults on my thoughts. Although drugs could dull what was happening to me, psychodynamic explanations seemed more likely to give the events meaning. The very appeal of psychoanalytic theory was how literary it is, although Freud (himself a remarkable prose stylist) tried his best to remain a scientific neurologist. In Lionel Trilling’s words, “Of all mental systems, the Freudian psychology is the one which makes poetry indigenous to the very constitution of the mind. Indeed the mind, as Freud sees it, . . . is in the greater part of its tendency exactly a poetry-making organ . . . It was left to Freud to discover how, in a scientific age, we still feel and think in figurative formations, and to create, what psychoanalysis is, a science of tropes, of metaphor.”

Nearly all psychodynamic schools have been shaped by Freud’s approach. This chapter started with an epigraph in which Freud movingly described his fears of block. What he thought causes block has less resonance for most of us.

 

Analysis shows that when activities like playing the piano, writing or even walking are subjected to neurotic inhibitions it is because the physical organs brought into play—the fingers or the legs—have become too strongly eroticized. . . . As soon as writing, which entails making a liquid flow out of a tube onto a piece of white paper, assumes the significance of copulation, or as soon as walking becomes a symbolic substitute for treading upon the body of mother earth, both writing and walking are stopped because they represent the performance of a forbidden sexual act. The ego renounces these functions, which are within its sphere, in order not to have to undertake fresh measures of repression—in order to avoid a conflict with the id.

 

Yikes. In this era, when even the Freudians are a little post-Freudian, we can once again read such a statement with almost as much shock as early twentieth-century readers had. Yet sanitized versions of Freud’s model still underlie much of the psychotherapy practiced in this country, Europe, and South America. For Freud, the blocking agent was the internalized, punishing father, and writing was symbolically associated with the writer’s childhood sexual desire for his mother. In fact, he believed that all creative work was driven by such neurotic associations—a twentieth-century version of the Romantics’ link between creativity and mental illness. Many modern psychotherapists would hurry past the infant sexuality part—at least when there are patients listening who might find it off-putting—but would still argue that blocked writers often keep themselves from writing because of either fear of punishment by or rebellion against parent-like authority.

Many psychoanalysts since Freud have developed their own theories of writer’s block or creative block. Although Jung shared Freud’s belief that fear and guilt cause block, he looked to earlier sources of childhood conflict, in the child’s ambivalence about becoming an entity independent of the mother. Jung was less interested in the idea of art as neurotic escape, instead emphasizing the role of the unconscious—especially the collective unconscious—as the source of creative inspiration. A striking feature of Jung’s theory is the extent to which the artist, at least the artist’s ego, is a passive recipient of the message of his or her work. Such passive “visitations from the muse” will come up again in Chapter 7.

I have described Ernst Kris’s theory that creative work requires both a strong ego and a strong id, to allow rapid alternation between primary- and secondary-process thought. If either conscious or unconscious processes gain ascendancy, the creative project fails. Block arises when the ego is too dominant: unusual ideas are repressed, and the work, if it continues, becomes arid. When the id is dominant, the work falls apart because it is undisciplined, because it expresses rather than communicates.

In describing how modern psychotherapy is often sanitized psychoanalysis, I have not been fair to the many therapists who have thoughtfully incorporated a number of different theoretical views. Such eclecticism, at its best, can allow awareness that there are many reasons to have writer’s block. Charles Ducey, the director of the Bureau of Study Counsel at Harvard University, offers such a list:

 

Some procrastinate because of their perfectionism; others experience being “blocked” as a result of their unbearable self-criticism and negative judgment. Some unconsciously associate writing with anxiety-arousing sexual or aggressive assertiveness, and consequently experience writing inhibitions; still others rebel against perceived demands of the “authorities” (parents, teachers) and engage in a sit-down strike against their own writing. Yet other students seem as yet developmentally unable to define their sense of self in either their work or their lives. Writing for them becomes an act of self-definition. Added to these issues of intrapsychic conflict and/or developmental lag is the ever-powerful behavioral vicious circle and impact of cognitive set, the self-reinforcing positive-feedback loop of being ever more incapable of writing, the more one believes that one has a condition known as “writer’s block.”

 

One systematic and accessible psychodynamic exploration of creative block, Abigail Lipson and David Perkins’s book Block, sees writer’s block as a special case of all counterintentional behaviors. These are behaviors in which you do what “you” don’t want to (such as sabotage an exercise program, or shout at a supervisor, or lack the nerve to ask a boy to the dance). Behaviors are interactions between forces or motivations. The will, or conscious intention, is only one of the many forces that drive us, and not one of the strong ones. Overcoming block requires not only insight to identify the relevant forces but then changing those forces—usually by changing the environment rather than by relying on an act of will alone.

Thus a writer who procrastinates by answering e-mail the instant it arrives generally finds willpower of little help in handling his e-mail addiction. But he may well be helped by an environmental change: disabling his e-mail so that he can check it only once a day at the local cybercafé (where he has to pay high rates for on-line time).

It is not uncommon, of course, for someone to overcome one obstacle to his work only to quickly replace it with a new one. The reformed e-mail addict may now find that chatting at the cybercafé is more and more eating into his writing time. If the force driving him first to e-mail and then to the café is the loneliness of writing, a simple change such as working at the café, among the comfortable buzz of the other customers, might be enough. If the force driving him is something more complicated, such as the desire to constantly communicate with others in order to impress them, he might find therapy helpful to temper that desire. Or he may admit to himself that it was the need to reach others that drove him to writing in the first place. Perhaps if he abandons the well-paid writing for specialty journals that he has ended up doing, and goes back to trying to write for a general audience, he will be able to give up his cybercafé cronies, whom he doesn’t much like anyway.

The Lipson and Perkins model, rather than assigning major importance to any one psychological theory or psychic force—such as libidinal urges, or conditioning experiences, or self-esteem—presumes that some or all of these may cause block in any given situation. Such psychodynamic approaches have both the advantage and the disadvantage of becoming very complicated very quickly.

 

That is rarely the case with the self-help literature on writer’s block, a genre that includes hundreds of books. It tends to provide theoretically meager instructions to be confident, brainstorm, and prioritize, and to order the set of audiotapes advertised at the back of the book. At their best, self-help books combine a systematized version of common sense with a more digestible version of psychodynamic therapy’s complex theories—again usually including a dollop of well-disguised Freud.

Much of the self-help literature on writer’s block falls into the broader category of creativity enhancement. One popular approach tries to decrease the writer’s perfectionism, or to silence his or her inner critics. This theme implicitly draws on the psychoanalytic concept of the superego, that internalized, harshly judgmental representation of parental and societal values. Yet lofty values alone are not sufficient to cause block. Writer’s block requires not just the inability to write as well as you want, but the inability to write anything less than you want. What drives that inability is the belief—usually unconscious—that it is better to write nothing than to write poorly. Whereas in fact, as G. K. Chesterton put it, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” (This quotation is usually misattributed to Oscar Wilde, as are most witty British-sounding epigrams.)

Perfectionism certainly causes some block. But it is invoked as a cause a little too often; it is such a comfortable explanation of your block. It is easier to tell people that you haven’t published much because you have such high standards, than that you are disorganized or inhibited or love to play tennis.

Self-help techniques for quieting the perfectionist’s inner critics include brainstorming, nurturing self-esteem, and visualization. In brainstorming, the inner critics are consciously suppressed and the goal is to write down as many ideas as possible without regard to quality. Only afterward is the editor allowed to throw out the trash. A related technique, called freewriting, does not even ask that the ideas be related to the topic—the writing is simply a way of loosening up the writer and decreasing his or her fear of paper. Anecdotal evidence tells us that brainstorming is effective in other fields as well as writing, for instance a ceramics teacher who divided his class into two groups. One group was graded solely on the quality of its best work; the other, solely on the quantity of work (fifty pounds of pots rated an A, forty a B, and so on). Students in the quality group needed only produce one perfect pot to get an A. Ironically, the best pots were produced in the quantity group.

Such anecdotes are appealing, and it is true that finding a good idea usually requires considering many bad ones with an open mind. But few scientific studies have been able to show in controlled situations that brainstorming significantly increases the quality of the best idea, although the volume of ideas grows. Most likely, this occurs because the quality of the average idea declines.

Several trials have shown that brainstorming done in groups (the preferred corporate method) is actually harmful, perhaps because no one is going to relax his or her editing superego in the presence of the boss. The modest effect of brainstorming even when done in private may reflect the fact that typical brainstorming is a “storm” only in the tamest sense. Brainstorming does not bear much relation to vivid primary-process thought or divergent thinking: it may produce more ideas, but not more unusual ones.

That brainstorming is a watered-down descendant of the Freudian technique of free association is clear. In an amusing example of back-and-forth borrowing, Freud himself got the idea for free association from an 1823 essay called “The Art of Becoming an Original Writer in Three Days.” But the way in which brainstorming differs from free association is important. Brainstorming is usually presented as easy (“all you have to do is relax”), whereas psychoanalysts eventually realized that true free association is quite difficult. The difficulty of escaping rigid thought patterns set up over a lifetime is encapsulated in Sandor Ferenczi’s famous statement that the patient is not cured through free association; he is cured when he can free associate.

The self-help approach to nurturing self-esteem often involves the writer’s giving himself unconditional praise. On Al Franken’s Saturday Night Live parody show “Daily Affirmation,” he would look into the mirror and say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me.” Techniques proposed seriously by writer’s block coaches often don’t differ much from Franken’s parody, and include making up rave reviews from famous critics, penciling yourself onto best-seller lists, and springing for a massage (“because I’m worth it”). Strong evidence exists that creative, productive people do have high self-esteem—often to the point of arrogance. There is much less evidence that insecure people can be made more secure, and more productive, by techniques such as these. Inaccurately high self-esteem can even cause poor performance, as well as sociopathy. This area is full of controversy.

Some writers have tried to defang their superego by visualizing a scene in which its personifications are silenced, as in Anne Lamott’s description:

 

First there’s the vinegar-lipped Reader Lady, who says primly, “Well, that’s not very interesting, is it?” And there’s the emaciated German male who writes these Orwellian memos detailing your thought crimes. And there are your parents, agonizing over your lack of loyalty and discretion; and there’s William Burroughs, dozing off or shooting up because he finds you as bold and articulate as a house plant; and so on. . . .

Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. . . . Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won’t do what they want—won’t give them more money, won’t be more successful, won’t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guiltmongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft.

A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. But I think he’s a little angry, and I’m sure nothing like this would ever occur to you!

 

Although I should point out that there’s not much more scientific evidence for visualization than there is for brainstorming, Lamott writes so well that I can’t resist promoting her technique.

Along with combating perfectionism, a second self-help approach to fighting writer’s block often puts the writer in touch with his or her inner child. The inner child is roughly the self-help name for what psychoanalysts would call the id, minus the lust and aggression that make the id not fit for family viewing. The inner child is an ideal child, playful and curious, and has little relation to actual children, who may insist on having the identical book read to them at bedtime each night and who would rather starve than try a new vegetable.

Getting in touch with the inner child shares with silencing internal critics the belief that the id-like force and the superego-like force are antagonistic and in a struggle to control you, the ego-like force. Techniques for getting in touch with the inner child tend to involve relaxation and visualization; they may encourage the writer to be more playful, sometimes through formalized writing games. One writing coach suggests that you “move around the room in a joyful way—skip, spin, sway—and say, ‘I’m a writer,’ about ten times.” If such an approach increases the writer’s intrinsic enjoyment of the project, it might foster creativity. To the extent that it merely embarrasses the writer and disturbs the neighbors, it is probably less helpful.

 

We now come to the explanations that writers give about themselves. Of course, some literary critics would argue that we shouldn’t ask writers about their writing—as the linguist Roman Jakobson remarked when the novelist Vladimir Nabokov was proposed for a chair in the English department at Harvard, “Are we next to invite an elephant to be professor of zoology?” (The result of Harvard’s hiring policy was that Nabokov was recruited by Cornell and became a wildly successful lecturer on literature there.)

Questions from audiences at writer’s workshops soon push authors into having opinions about writer’s block. Often, authors’ advice is practical: edit something you wrote the day before, always stop at an easy spot, start with an outline that gets more and more elaborate until it becomes your text, start with stream of consciousness writing, don’t edit too early, drink lots of coffee, take a break. Some recommended treatments for writer’s block are much more esoteric:

 

Another method which may be helpful for others (it helps me) is the use of binaural signals through a binaural signal generator or music which incorporates this technology. The signals basically help one change brain wave states from Alpha to Beta to Theta and down to Delta. The optimum brain wave state for learning and creating is the state between Theta and Delta. This can be reached by various means including the use of sound-light machines, binaural signal generators, music with the signals incorporated within it or tapping on key points along the meridians of the body.

 

The question would-be authors ask authors over and over is about their writing habits: whether they write in the morning or evening, lying down like Capote or standing up like Hemingway, in Proust’s cork-lined room or Woolf’s room of one’s own. Answers are often elaborate:

 

W. Somerset Maugham’s day began at 8 A.M. with breakfast on a tray and the morning papers. He shaved in his bath, consulted with his Italian cook about the day’s menus and then repaired to his den, where he wrote with a special fountain pen until precisely 12:45 P.M. “My brain is dead after 1 o’clock,” Maugham decreed. The rest of the day unfolded with a one-martini lunch, a nap, golf or tennis, the cocktail hour and then a formal black-tie dinner, always with champagne. This rarely varied routine produced 74 novels, plays, collections of essays and short stories in 65 years at his writing desk.

 

These habits are amusing, but usually not helpful to anyone but their inhabitors. Writers write every which way; the only ingredient their habits have in common is that having habits helps, and that, as a rule it’s better not to be interrupted much. (Even this isn’t universal. I like to work in a room where my family is milling about. It keeps me from missing them, and the mindset required to filter out the crashes—my children are throwing spoons at the moment—somehow helps me to focus.)

It is evident that the existence, if not the detail, of the habits is important. As a scientist would put it, habits have a highly stabilizing effect on behavior; in the vernacular, without habits we would be a mess. The loss of habits accounts for much of the fatigue we feel when in a new country or on a new job. If it weren’t for habits, who could bear the misery of rising before dawn to run shivering to the car and then repeatedly risk death on the highway to go to work every day? Similarly, writers depend on writing habits to get them going each time they lift a pen or strike a key.

Habit is a phenomenon that can be understood neuroscientifically. Eric Kandel, a Nobel laureate in 2000 for his work on the neurobiology of habit, was the first to show the electrochemical changes that occur at nerve synapses when primitive habits are being formed. He originally performed his experiments in sea slugs; similar although more complicated mechanisms exist in higher animals. In mammals, habit learning proceeds through a different mechanism than declarative learning (the learning of memorized facts) and requires subcortical brain regions more than it does the cerebral cortex. Declarative memory, however, depends crucially on the temporal lobe, in the hippocampus. The extensively studied amnestic patient H.M., for instance, has lost his declarative memory after sustaining damage to both temporal lobes. After hearing of his father’s death for the hundredth time, he is as piteously distressed as he was the first time. But he can still learn habits and nondeclarative motor skills, such as riding a bicycle.

Writers describing their blocks are more likely than the self-help literature is to attribute their problems to lack of ideas or to the difficulty of finding words to express what is floating inarticulately in their heads. (It is no surprise that the relentlessly optimistic self-help literature does not stress these difficult-to-fix factors.) Many writers have explicitly Romantic notions of inspiration, seeing themselves as its passive recipients (while not denying the hard work it takes to wrench the inspiration into some publishable form). Such notions present writer’s block not as an obstruction but as a lack. To fill such a void writers may try to assimilate the ideas of others—or hope for divine grace.

Writers such as Stanley Kunitz describe not writing as a way of retaining one’s ideas and options, of not losing them to the harsh realities of written language. “The poem [’On the Edge’],” Kunitz said, “also came out of not writing. I was going through one of my extensive three month dry spells or maybe I was simply dissatisfied with what I was writing. . . . The poem is really, I guess, about not writing, about the power one gains by not committing oneself; one becomes almost God-like.”

Writers are more vocal than the upbeat self-help literature about the external forces that frustrate their work: poverty, the need to work a day job, the callousness of publishers, racial or gender discrimination. Some writers faced with such external blocks may be well aware that the problem starts outside themselves; others may have internalized society’s messages (“As a Mexican, I have no words worth saying”) or blame themselves (“I don’t write because I’m lazy,” as opposed to “I don’t write because I have a sixty-hour-a-week day job”). In an ideal world, many of these factors would be absent. But not all of them—most writers would stop short of wishing their family away. The tension is expressed in Yeats’s poem “The Choice,” which begins

 

The intellect of man is forced to choose

Perfection of the life, or of the work,

And if it take the second must refuse

A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.

 

Parents, at least those who have a substantial role in taking care of their children, are often told that they must choose between having children and being creative. “Balzac, you remember, described creation in terms of motherhood,” said the poet Tillie Olsen. “Yes, in intelligent passionate motherhood there are similarities, and in more than the toil and patience. The calling upon total capacities; the reliving and new using of the past; the comprehensions; the fascination, absorption, intensity. All almost certain death to creation—(so far). Not because the capacities to create no longer exist, or the need . . . but because the circumstances for sustained creation have been almost impossible.” (italics added)

Is it true that parenthood and creativity are so similar that they are in direct conflict? Sometimes the energy and discipline of parenthood spills over into one’s writing. For instance, a friend, parent of four children, finished her novel only after firing her full-time nanny. This is the opposite of the sabbatical effect that has crippled several other friends. They finally get a year off to write, and their output plummets. As the old adage says, “If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person.”

Writing and parenthood are tangled in my own mind since it was after the death of my twin sons and again after the birth of my twin daughters that writing pushed everything else from my head. Because my daughters were premature, they were conveniently small enough to both fit on my desk in a bureau drawer, where they slept while I wrote. Once in a while a little arm would come out and pat the screen. When they woke up, I could nurse one on my lap while I typed across her, simultaneously rocking her sister in an infant bouncy chair with one foot.

The baby in the bouncy chair always went to sleep first. Once they were both asleep, I would put them in the crib, lie down in my own bed next to them, and continue writing in the small circle of a book light and my children’s soft breathing in the dark. When one woke up, I would write on the floor as I rocked her again in the bouncy chair. For some reason I wrote in tiny tiny writing on tiny tiny Post-its, which I would stick to the wall and collect in the morning. My husband, who was remarkably tolerant throughout the periods of my intensest writing and who was much more help than any medicine, said that my trying to write an entire book on the smallest size of Post-its was the act that most convinced him I was deeply disturbed.

I think Olsen was wrong about parenthood’s hurting writing, at least in my case. I believe I wrote, and write, better when I can smell my daughters’ hair and hear the little grunts they make in their sleep. Even now that they are in preschool, I love it when one sits on each knee as I write—although there admittedly is a problem seeing the computer screen over their heads. Their voices (“Let’s play I’m a mice.” “No, let’s play tickle ourchother.”) keep me from floating too far into my own world.

There remains the more critical question of the degree to which obsessive writing hurts parenthood. How abnormal is it that I am so absorbed in my writing that I am scarcely distracted by the conversation of my daughters six inches from my head? I would like to think that writing is the least of my many faults as a parent, that writing while my children play under the table is not much more harmful to them than was my ancestor’s hoeing the potatoes while her children played among the rows. Of course, my abilities as either a mother or a writer will be for my daughters and my readers to say. But to have a parent who takes joy in something, especially if she can share that joy with her children, is better than to have a parent who resents her children for keeping her from her vocation.

My admittedly airbrushed picture of writing and motherhood may anger people whose babies cry more than mine did, and who make trying to write like wading through tar. Yet we had our share of month-long colic, hospital stays for asthma, and even a complicated bacterial meningitis that had all four of us living in a tiny quarantine room for several weeks. Maybe it is irrational to believe that if you love your family and your vocation enough, if your concentration on each is pure enough, then you will find time for both of them. It is true, anyway. Who said all true things are rational?

This is not to deny the block caused by distractions such as raising children, getting a plumber for the leaky shower, deciding what car to buy, answering absolutely vital e-mails from colleagues. Typically, the advice given to people grappling with such blocks emphasizes a cognitive solution: listing tasks in order of importance and postponing or jettisoning the unimportant ones. The companies that sell day-planners announce heroically that their little planners “unleash the power of employees to focus on and execute priorities.” The women’s magazine version of the same advice is “Don’t try to be Supermom—relax your standards for cleaning house.” What both approaches neglect is that it is painful to jettison those other tasks—they are important to us although we don’t want them to be. For many people it is very unpleasant to live in a dirty house, or to buy a car without researching it intensively.

The manic goal-directedness of my postpartum hypergraphia leads me to suspect that many of the people who “get things done,” who seem able to resist the pull of alternative tasks, are not having to make the effortful cognitive choices or acts of will that the above approach requires. Instead, they are in a mood state that is so focused on one goal that the distractions hardly register. In other words, the solution is not to choose to stop cleaning and live in squalor—that would be misery. The solution is never even to see the squalor because you are so wrapped up in your project. Although that sounds even harder, it is not always the case. (Chapter 6 outlines what is known of the biochemistry of inducing such goal-oriented motivational states.)

One characteristic of people in such states is that they often make quick decisions, saving a great deal of fussing time that can then be used to work. Quick decisions are not always the best decisions, however. Thus, people who are so involved in their work that they ignore their bills and make snap decisions about car purchases are best suited by having a spouse, collaborators, or employees with temperaments opposite to theirs, who can keep their affairs in order.

 

Finally, after considering the opinions of writers about their block, I want to look too at the opinions of literary critics, the zoologists of the authorial bestiary. Much of the literary theory on block has focused on the Romanticists’ view, both because Romantic ideas about block are still enormously influential, and because so many Romantic writers were so terribly blocked. The Romantics’ belief that creative inspiration arises from an irrational, uncontrollable inner source did not originate with them. What was new for the Romantics was their emphasis on the sublime, the experience of transcendence in the presence of a phenomenon—frequently a natural object—with grandeur too great to be expressed.

If the sublime is that which cannot be expressed, a painful inarticulateness and writer’s block seem inevitable. So much Romantic work was incomplete because of block that the unfinished literary fragment became its own genre, as in Coleridge’s famously interrupted “Kubla Khan: A Fragment.” Writing fragments let the Romantics symbolize, by their act of falling mute, how much the object of their poem transcended their description of it. Most modern genres, however, do not allow this treatment of block.

The Romantics also managed to deal with writer’s block by the common strategy of writing about it. Coleridge, for instance, described the mute dejection associated with the failure of his “genial spirits” (his faculty of creativity):

 

A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,

Which finds no natural outlet, no relief,

In word, or sigh, or tear. . . .

My genial spirits fail;

And what can these avail

To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

 

Modern critics have pointed out that the towering presences that struck the Romantics speechless were as often the great writers of the past as they were majestic crags. Walter Jackson Bate has argued that as printing became less expensive and more of the great writing of the past was available to intimidate younger writers, poets began to see poetry as in a decline, unable to meet the standard of Shakespeare or Milton. Of course, even Shakespeare had his own worries, as in Sonnet 26. It begins by describing the “beautiful old rhyme” that flowed from the “antique pen” of the superior, ancient poets, and ends with the starkly moving couplet, “For we, which now behold these present days, / Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.” Or, in Mark Twain’s rather different voice, “What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.”

This emphasis on the burden of the past shares much with the psychoanalytic approach. For literary critics, the most significant past is the literary past, the vast weight of talented writers. For psychoanalysts, the blocking agent is not the literary forefathers but the actual father. Harold Bloom made more explicit the Oedipal overtones of a writer’s being blocked by towering predecessors and argued that writers respond to their literary forefathers the way children respond to their parents. Because of the requirement that great works be original, the artist must try not to be what he admires—a recipe for suffering similar to that of a small boy who wants to be his father and have all his father’s privileges. In Bloom’s account, only a few of the most notable poets manage to escape the blocking influence of their literary parents, and they do so by misreading the predecessor’s work in a way that clears imaginative space for their own work. In a crude sense, the successful poet invents a fault in the predecessor in the same way an adolescent invents reasons to criticize her parents as she is trying to become less dependent on them.

Bloom proposed six ways in which such creative misreading allows escape from writer’s block. I will not attempt to define them, but list them because their names are so euphonious, if shamelessly opaque—clinamen, kenosis, tessera, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades. (Is it ill-bred to point out that terms like these make medical words such as hypergraphia sound colloquial?)

Although Bloom and Bate focus on some of the most talented writers in English, even a child writing a class paper can feel the anxiety of influence when faced with the superior prose and knowledge of his junior encyclopedia. Much plagiarism starts from such situations. Would teaching writers about clinamen, kenosis, and the like provide them with an alternative to writer’s block or plagiarism? I admit to being dubious.

The theories of Bloom and Bate, that great precursors are barriers to a writer’s aspiration to originality, predict an inevitable decline in literature as the sheer mass of predecessors increases over time. This puts the two critics squarely in the “things were better in the old days” school, a position that has been historically more popular with people over forty than under. In fact, writer’s block is not an inevitable response to masterpieces. They can inspire, as in Keats’s exhilarated response to reading the Chapman translation of Homer:

 

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 

Silent—briefly. Why was Keats inspired and Coleridge blocked by past writers? The answer brings us back from literary history to personal history: the individual experiences and temperaments of each writer.

The notion that writer’s block is an inevitable, even fitting, response to the sublime natural and literary world neither began nor ended with the Romantics. It arose much earlier, from a deep distrust of language’s tendency to distort the real world. That distrust, perhaps first put into writing by Plato, has persisted in modern and postmodern writers in many forms. For Roland Barthes, the conflict between writing and truth arises by definition: a creative writer is someone for whom writing is a problem.

Writers and theorists sometimes take the argument for writer’s block one step further, proposing that it is a necessary stage in the composition process, a period of preparation. As the writer Victoria Nelson remarked: “Writing/not writing represents a natural alternation of states, an instinctive rhythm that lies at the heart of the creative experience. To steal a metaphor from Coleridge (who stole it from the Germans), they are the inseparable systole and diastole, the contraction and expansion, of the creative experience.” Or as James Thurber more graphically put it: “There’s a time to go to the typewriter. It’s like a dog—the way a dog before it craps wanders around in circles—a piece of earth, an area of grass, circles it for a long time before it squats. It’s like that—figuratively circling the typewriter.”

It is difficult to imagine that the term “writer’s block” should apply both to such pregnant silences and to the smothering state described by Coleridge. Yet an inexperienced writer might mistake the former for the latter, become depressed or anxious, and then have the depression or anxiety truly create a block in the latter sense of the word. Once we start using these clinical terms, however, the landscape suddenly changes. Depression and anxiety are disorders that we are increasingly comfortable describing as brain disorders, and if writer’s block is caused by them, it is a very different phenomenon indeed. Or is it?