Block Party
I’ve been thinking a lot about writer’s block lately, mostly because I’ve been dealing with it for a few months now, and I think I may have found a way to deal with it. And the fact that this has been published means I’ve been at least partially successful.
Writer’s block is a near-cliched catch-all term that generally refers to a writer’s (or any artist’s, really) seeming inability to produce work. Most people have heard of it and I don’t think the definition is up for debate. But that still leaves me wondering: what are we all picturing when we think of that phrase, “Writer’s Block” Is it yucky stuff caught in a pipe that stops your flow? A giant stone wall? An amazing writing parade stymied by a police barricade? Being the literal-minded person I tend to be, I pictured an actual block: a huge (like two stories tall) cube just sitting on a path in an open (and barren, I hate to admit) landscape, with a would-be writer standing in front of it, flummoxed. And my impoverished imagination has the writer as a stick figure and their confusion is displayed with an array of question marks shooting out of their head. It’s like if the NYT ran a story about writer’s block and the first six people they asked to draw the accompanying illustration were busy that day.
But that image has shifted. And shifted again. It shifted and continued to shift as I thought more about it. The first big leap was twofold. The perspective changed from observing a nameless, faceless writer to seeing what the writer sees. And the boring featureless box turned into a team of near-wild horses rearing up in front of me. Each horse represented a different element that impeded my progress, and behind them all, controlling them, was fear.
“Um, we were sent here by a deep primal emotion?”
Photo by Vladimir Vujeva on Unsplash
This was a revelation to me. Earlier this spring I recognized fear as a bigger factor in my life than I had understood it to be. That’s probably a whole other post (there are already 500 words on the subject that have been left out of this draft). But suffice it to say that once I realized I was putting off calling a loved one because I was— as a result of our long, complicated, and at times emotionally fraught relationship— afraid to, something clicked in me. And then, like when you learn a new word, I began to see fear everywhere. It was insidious and sneaky and rarely announced itself. It hid behind the bad habits it drove before it. Like a madman holding the reins of wild beasts, he can only just barely keep in check. This, naturally, brings us back to the wall of horses. A full rank of them, rearing up and snorting and just being generally imposing and scary. Their size alone is enough to give one pause, their hostile behavior is, well, it’s probably where the metaphor falls apart.
Because just as soon as I finished putting that image together I saw that the horses were in the wrong place. They should be behind me, pulling on me, slowing me down. Fear is still there, I suppose, still personified, still whipping them on. I’m not sure if he’s switching from side to side to get all the horses equally or what’s going on, but he’s there encouraging them to pull harder. Maybe he’s on them or in their bodies or maybe their minds. And here’s where this metaphor falls apart. Or maybe I’m letting myself get distracted by unnecessary details, while one of the horses pulling on me now has to do so with her ears ringing.
Because these horses all have a name and they’re all comically descriptive: Unnecessary Details, It Can Wait Til Later, It Could Still Be Better, One More Pass, Endless String of Qualifications, Another Pass. Unsounsdwave the Self-Deprecating Decepticon, A**teri*k, Parenthetical Phrases (If You Know What I Mean), Let’s Read Through It Again, and everyone’s favorite, Who Even Cares What I Think? And they all pull on me, relentlessly, slowing me down, making it hard to move forward, even impossible at times.
I keep working on pieces to make them better, and I do it again. And again. And then I worry people won’t understand me so I add preambles and stuff sidebars into the main text and employ so many parentheses and emdashes that they’re thinking of starting a union. Then I gotta make sure people don’t think I think I’m smarter than I am and they know that I know that we both know exactly how little I know. Fine. But now it’s too long and unwieldy and honestly, who cares? And that’s where the cycle, such as it, begins again. After I take a break and put it off for a little while.That’s what writer’s block has become to me. A dragging down of my limbs and a dampening of my enthusiasm. The feeling that I can’t move forward until I meet these particular obligations, a task that is always beyond my capabilities. Because if I never post the thing, I don’t have to be afraid.
At this point you might be so overwhelmed with joy that I was able to figure all of this out, you might not even think to ask any of the questions I’ve left unanswered such as: How strong do you think you are? How strong do you think horses are? Don’t you think maybe a team of something smaller might be more believable? Like a trunk full of agitated squirrels? Did you even address the issue of “writer’s block” or did you just spend 1000 words relabeling it “fear”? What is it you’re afraid of, anyway? Why are you making fear out to be so bad? Doesn’t being afraid of things help us stay away from harmful things like poisonous snakes, the edges of pits, and evangelical Christians? And even if you did correctly identify the problem, what now?
Great questions! I don’t think I’m particularly strong— certainly not strong enough to rival a horse— so yeah, a smaller animal is in order. But introducing rodents into the picture seems like we’d lose some of the romance, so I’ll meet you, Deer Reader, halfway, and say I have dogs pulling on me now.
“Um, we were sent here by some scary horsies?”
Photo by Bharathi Kannan on Unsplash
In a sense, yes, I did just relabel it. But with relabeling it I feel like I gained a better sense of what I’m dealing with. “The power in naming things,” and whatnot. And I realized that many of the bad habits and poor decisions I make, like committing to writing 50 posts in one year based solely on some exercises in a book from the last century I found in a thrift store, are just ways to avoid my fear by distancing myself from my writing. Because I’m afraid of being too vulnerable. My fear is finding out I’m stupid. Or even just looking stupid. Even being hopelessly average would mess with this image I have of myself.
And so yeah, fear is obviously useful, but not when it paralyzes you. And that’s what I hope to get out of the above: to get past that paralysis by looking clearly at the situation and recognize what I’m doing to myself. It feels like it puts me in the position to begin making better choices, even if I still haven’t yet worked out exactly what those choices will be.
Well, I made the mistake of giving this “another pass” before posting, so now here is “Unsounsdwave the Self-Deprecating Decepticon,” with some final pronouncements: The writing is too terse and too careful. It reads like someone who is afraid to make a mistake. Good writing is more than just “not bad’ writing. The callback ending is kinda funny but it all ends too abruptly.
