AND COMING UP WITH A SUBHEAD
IS NO JOY, EITHER
May 1988
Where do we get off calling it “Writer’s Block”? That’s what comes of playing with words instead of working with more palpable substances. We think we have the right to make words do what we want them to, rather like Humpty Dumpty.
I mean, does an out-of-work steelworker call it Steelworker’s Block? The hell he does. He calls it Unemployment. He may not like it, he may gripe about it, he may go down to his friendly neighborhood tavern and tie one on, but he doesn’t paw through the dictionary, haul out a couple of words, knot them together and proclaim himself the victim of some new metaphysical disease.
When the port is closed, do the longshoremen suffer from Docker’s Block? During the NFL strike, did the offensive linemen complain of Blocker’s Block? Of course they didn’t. Only the writer, propped on a pile of unwritten words, uses two of them to hide the fact that he’s just sitting around like a bum and not doing anything.
I don’t know about this. I mean, talk about self-referential art. In high school I wrote a textbook-perfect sonnet (A-B-B-A-A-B-B-A C-D-C-D-C-D) about my inability to compose a sonnet. I don’t for a moment think I was the first person to do so. Poets have written villanelles lamenting the difficulty of creating a villanelle, and a couple of years back Tom Disch wrote a really wonderful sestina on, you guessed it, the composition of a sestina.
So I suppose there’s ample precedent for a column on writer’s block (whatever that is) in the form of a struggle with the subject’s topic. And I’ll grant that you can’t fault such a column for lack of honesty. Because, whether or not there’s a condition deserving of the term writer’s block, I am one unemployed steelworker at the moment.
I have spent the past two weeks in residence at the writers’ colony I so glowingly described in last month’s column. I came here with hopes that seemed at the time not unrealistic. When I booked my stay here, I thought I might have hit on a novel to write by the time I got here. If that didn’t happen, I was looking forward to the luxury of a secluded month in which to write shorter fiction. I haven’t written many short stories in the past several years, and the thing is I like short stories, I enjoy writing them and enjoy having written them. There’s not much economic sense in writing short stories, but I’m at the point where mine have a chance of landing at better markets, and I’ve had the luck to publish two collections of them, so their composition is not entirely pointless from a dollars-and-cents standpoint. I certainly make more money writing short stories than laundry lists or suicide notes, and have a better time in the bargain.
So I got here and I wrote half a short story and threw it away. Then I moped. Then I went to an art supply house and bought paints and brushes and canvases and a $10 easel and a great many rolls of masking tape and spent a couple of days painting, a pursuit for which I have no discernible talent and precious little vision. The point of painting was to have fun, but the fun was severely curtailed by the ever-present knowledge that I was not doing what I was supposed to be doing.
Then I spent three days on a new novel. It was to be the sixth book in my Burglar series, but it won’t be, because it will never get past the 33rd page. There’s nothing wrong with what I’ve written. There was nothing wrong with the 13 pages of short story, either. But neither is there any reason to go on with it. It’s pointless. It’s a waste of time. The words won’t come, and there’s no reason why they should. I don’t feel like writing anything. I’m sick of writing, I’ve done enough writing, I’ve been writing one goddamned thing or another for more years than I can count. If I ever had anything to say in the first place, a hypothesis that strikes me as tenuous in the extreme, I’ve certainly said it by now.
In The New York Times Book Review recently was a remarkable article about Henry Roth, whose first novel, Call It Sleep, was published more than half a century ago. It was reissued in paperback in the early ’60s, at which time it became a great bestseller, an undiscovered classic that got discovered in a big way.
Now, as if to prove he’s no flash in the pan, its author has come out with a second book.
For more than 20 years after the publication of Call It Sleep, Mr. Roth didn’t write a word. Call it hibernation.
Who knows why? It sometimes seems to me that we should marvel not when a writer stops writing but when he doesn’t. And it’s not that unusual for a writer to stop after one book. There seems to be such a thing as a one-book writer. If, as we’re occasionally told, everybody has one book in him, why shouldn’t there be some people who, having written that one book, have nothing more to offer?
The Times article suggests why Mr. Roth may have stopped. Call It Sleep is a novel of a young man growing up on New York’s Lower East Side, written in an experimental, innovative style that owes something to James Joyce. Its author was at the time very much a political leftist, and his book was criticized by his fellows as being politically incorrect.
As he sees it now, Mr. Roth would have followed Call It Sleep with a second novel continuing the adventures of the book’s protagonist. But his political orientation disposed him to regard such a sequel as unacceptable, and he was not artistically impelled to write something that he would deem politically desirable, and as a consequence he wrote nothing.
Now if Mr. Roth—
Leave it alone. What, after all, do I know about Roth? Only what I read in the article, and I don’t have that at hand and will probably misremember some salient fact if I keep rattling on about him I never read Call It Sleep, though not for lack of trying, and I don’t know anything about Roth’s life.
Even so, I find myself reminded of what happened to a friend of mine.
He’s a science fiction writer. Years ago—ages ago—he was writing science fiction stories for the pulps. (This must have been in the late ’40s, early ’50s.) He sold what he wrote, and he wrote a lot.
Then one day his agent took him aside. “You know,” he said, “you’re doing pretty well, selling everything you write, but I think your career’s on shaky ground. You’ve got all your eggs in one basket, and what happens if the basket spills? I think you should diversify. Don’t just write science fiction. Develop a secondary area.”
“Like what?”
“Sports stories,” said the agent.
“Sports stories?”
“Right. For the sports pulps. Good solid market. And a really good sports story sometimes makes it into one of the slicks, which is more than you can say for science fiction. I think you should try your hand at sports stories.”
“But I’ve never even read a sports story,” my friend said.
“So read,” said the agent.
“But I don’t know anything about sports,” my friend protested. “I was never good at sports. Even as a child—”
“You don’t have to go out in the streets and play stickball,” the agent said. “You’re a writer, for heaven’s sake. You’ll read a few of the stories and you’ll figure out how to write them. Look, give it a try. If it doesn’t work out, what have you lost?”
So my friend bought a handful of pulp magazines and read sports stories, and then he sat down and wrote one. And the agent sold it. And he wrote another. And the agent sold that one, too. And he wrote, all in all, maybe half a dozen sports stories. Maybe a dozen. Who remembers?
The agent sold every sports story he wrote.
And then one day my friend found out he couldn’t write another sports story, and neither could he write a science fiction story. And he didn’t write a word for the next three years. (Or two years. Or four years. Who remembers?)
He never did write another sports story. (If he did, he would have had to eat it. The sports pulp market is right up there with the great auk and the passenger pigeon. The science fiction market, on the other hand, is doing very nicely, thank you.) After three years (or two or four) he resumed writing science fiction. But writing, which had been easy for him, was no longer quick and effortless. He was careful at it, as men who have had bypass surgery are careful at life.
OK, genius, do you want to tell the nice people what you’re getting at?
I suppose my point might be that writing ability is a sensitive plant indeed, and we tamper with it at our peril. It seems to me to be dangerous in the extreme for a writer to force himself to write what he does not really want to write, just as it is dangerous for him to refrain from writing what he really does want to write.
I think, not for the first time, of Stephen King’s response when asked why he writes the kind of books he does. “What makes you assume I have any choice?”
I can envision Henry Roth, with one voice in his head telling him what to write and another telling him not to write it. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Nothing happens. Nothing happens for years on end.
Let’s keep all of this in perspective. If there is such a thing as writer’s block, I don’t think that’s what I’ve got. What’s galling is not that I’m not writing but that I’m doing this non-writing at a writers’ colony. If I were elsewhere I would not characterize myself as being blocked. I would say that I was between books. I spend most of my life between books and I have generally found it a comfortable place to be. When it gets uncomfortable, that usually means it’s time to write another book.
It’s not time yet. I finished a major work, Random Walk, less than six months ago. It took a lot out of me (which is as it should be) and I have not yet filled up with whatever it will take to write the next book. That’s fine. Recovering from a book is part of the process of writing the next one, and it takes as long as it takes.
To complicate matters, Random Walk was a profound departure from my previous books; having written it, I don’t know that I can go back to the kind of books I used to write. Nor, at this point, do I know what other sort of books I might write instead. This uncertainty is not inappropriate, but it can be worrisome, especially if I’m at a colony and thus feel as though I ought to be writing something.
Interesting.
You’ve been here just over two weeks. You struggled through half of a short story and three chapters of a book—all wasted effort, and slow going, and agony to write. Yesterday you spent the entire day battling your way through last month’s column, crumpling sheets of paper and throwing them away, pushing the typewriter aside, pacing the floor, making yourself nuts.
Today, writing a disorganized shriek of a column on writer’s block (whatever that is) you’ve hammered out what certainly looks like a perfectly acceptable column in two hours flat.
Go figure.